On election night, Donald Trump is planning to declare victory long before all the votes are counted. How? Axios scoops:
Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won. For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.
Of course all the votes won’t be counted. In many states, few of the votes will have been tallied by election officials.
Trump’s team is preparing to falsely claim that mail-in ballots counted after Nov. 3 — a legitimate count expected to favor Democrats — are evidence of election fraud. Many prognosticators say that on election night, Trump will likely appear ahead in Pennsylvania — though the state’s final outcome could change substantially as mail-in ballots are counted over the following days.
Trump campaign surrogate Jason Miller began laying the groundwork for this on ABC’s This Week by falsely claiming Trump will have enough electoral votes on election night.
Many states can’t by law begin counting votes until Election Day and with so many mail in ballots, some states will take days, perhaps weeks to count all the mail in ballots. Those ballots are expected to heavily favor democrats.
Trump’s team will declare that if the state shifts from the president’s column on election night to Biden after all the votes are counted, then the election has been “stolen” from Trump.
