‘They’re trying to rig’ — Trump says election officials part of ‘corrupt Democrat machine’

President Donald Trump says the Democratic Party is trying to rig the 2020 US presidential election in favour of candidate Joe Biden. 

Speaking at the White House on Friday morning (Nigerian time), the president said election officials are part of a “corrupt Democrat machine”.

“There’s tremendous litigation going on, and this is a case where they’re trying to steal an election. They’re trying to rig an election and we can’t let that happen,” Trump said on Friday.

“Detroit and Philadelphia, known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country easily, cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race, a very important presidential race.

“This was unprecedented in American history. This was by design. Despite years of claiming to care about the election security, they refuse to include any requirement to verify signatures, identities, or even determined whether they’re eligible or ineligible to vote.

“People are walking in there, they have no idea. They just take in the numbers. They’re writing down things, the workers, and doing a lot of bad things. And we have a lot of information coming and litigation that you’ll see that will shake even you people up, and you’ve seen it all.

“The officials overseeing the counting in Pennsylvania and other key states are all part of a corrupt Democrat machine that you’ve written about.

“I went to school there and I know a lot about it. It hasn’t changed since a long time ago and hasn’t changed. It has gotten worse.”

Trump: Count legal votes, I easily win

Trump said if “you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us”.

“In Pennsylvania, Democrats have gone to the State Supreme Court to try and ban our election observers and very strongly,” the president added.

“Now we won the case, but they’re going forward. They don’t want anybody in there. They don’t want anybody watching them as they count the ballots, and I can’t imagine why.

“There’s absolutely no legitimate reason why they would not want to have people watching this process, because if it’s straight, they should be proud of it. Instead, they’re trying obviously to commit fraud. There’s no question about that.”

Election observers ‘using Binoculars to monitor poll’

Trump, who is trailing Biden with over four million votes, said election observers have been sent far away from the voting process that they have to use binoculars to monitor the poll.

“In Philadelphia, observers have been kept far away, very far away. So far that people are using binoculars to try and see, and there’s been tremendous problems caused.

“They put a paper on all of the windows so you can’t see in, and the people that are banned are very unhappy and become somewhat violent.”

Trump alleged there was “historic election interference from big media, big money, and big tech”.

MSNBC, ABC, CBS, CNBC, and NBC cut away from his speech stating that the president was peddling falsehood.

Biden tweeted after Trump’s speech that “no one is going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever”.

“America has come too far, fought too many battles, and endured too much to let that happen,” he said.

Experts do not share Trump claims that the electoral process has been compromised.

David Levine, an elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, had said at a foreign press briefing that “state and local officials typically require several days to weeks to certify election final results in order to ensure that every legally cast vote is accurately counted”.

He added that the increased use of “mail ballots due to COVID-19 protocols, coronavirus pandemic, could leave officials with incomplete results on election night and that’s okay.

“Certainly it isn’t evidence of nefarious conduct.”

Trump is still 56 electoral votes away from the 270-mark of victory, while Biden is only six votes away from becoming the 46th president of the US.