In what could be the first sign of concession, U.S. President Donald Trump acknowledged Sunday that Democrat Joe Biden won the presidential election, but maintained false claims that the election was “rigged.”
“He won because the Election was Rigged,” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter Sunday morning. “NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more!”
Trump’s tweet comes just over a week after the Associated Press and all other major news outlets projected Biden and Kamala Harris as president-elect and vice president-elect respectively.
Biden has been projected to win at least 290 electoral votes, significantly higher than the 270 needed to secure the presidency.
What’s more, a mandatory audit underway is underway in Georgia, with Biden expected to win the state and its 16 electoral votes.
Minutes after Trump posted the tweet on Sunday, the platform placed a warning card on it, saying “this claim about voter fraud is disputed.”
In the days following the election, Trump has repeatedly claimed, without providing evidence, that the election was “rigged.”
His team has filed a number of lawsuits in key battleground states, alleging that there was mass fraud due to the use of mail-in ballots amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Other suits claim Republican poll watchers were denied access to oversee ballot counting.
However, election officials across the country have maintained that there was no wide-scale voter fraud or irregularities reported and that both Democrats and GOP members were present during the counting process.
In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has declared the Nov. 3 election to be the most secure in U.S. history, finding no evidence of electoral fraud.
Many of the lawsuits launched by the Trump team have since been shot down.
Trump’s tweet also comes a day after several thousand of his supporters protested the election results and marched to the Supreme Court.
As night fell, clashes between counter-demonstrators led to fistfights, at least one stabbing and more than 20 arrests.
Several other cities on Saturday also saw gatherings of Trump supporters unwilling to accept Biden’s electoral college and popular vote victory as legitimate.
But breaking with a long-held tradition, world leaders — including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — have not waited for Trump to concede before offering their congratulations to Biden.
He and Harris are expected to be inaugurated in January.
–With a file from the Associated Press
© 2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
