We Must Condemn The Premature Victory and Unfounded Fraud Claims By The President

On October 12th, I made a 4 point pledge to honor our democratic elections, including no tolerance for any candidate who prematurely claims victory or fraud without evidence.

Today, we must condemn the words of President Trump who has both claimed victory before a sufficient number of votes have been counted, and also made an unfounded allegation of fraud due to the winner not being confirmed on election night. Specifically, I condemn these statements by Trump: “Frankly, we did win this election” and “This is a major fraud on our nation.”

Trump also said “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.” Active voting has stopped, but votes already cast or postmarked must be counted and should not be confused for new votes. By claiming without evidence that voting hasn’t stopped on time, his words mislead his listeners and betray election officials working to ensure a proper process.

Trump has betrayed our trust in election results before, making false claims that votes “showed up out of nowhere” in the 2018 Florida election. Trump is already trying it again this year, tweeting that his leads in some states “magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted”. Absentee or mailed ballots are not magical nor surprising; we’ve know for some time now this year would have a higher than ever number of absentee ballots due to the pandemic. He also baselessly tweeted that “they are trying to STEAL the Election.” We simply cannot tolerate these kinds of claims without evidence.

Pennsylvania is at 64% reporting right now and there are twice as many absentee ballots left to count as the lead Trump currently holds. It could go either way in that state and could still determine the final outcome. We must allow legally cast votes to be counted to preserve democracy.

Trump can fairly claim victory in Ohio. At 94% reporting and a lead of 470,000, the Associated Press has projected a win for Trump. However, in fairness to the more than 2.6 million Ohioans who voted for Biden, and every U. S. citizen who cares about fair elections, we must expect all states to be counted until a sufficient margin of victory exceeds remaining uncounted votes.

In fairness, the context of Trump’s premature claim to victory does suggest his statement was meant as a prediction of winning rather than a full-throated, balloon-dropping declaration. Nonetheless, asserting that he “did win” before sufficient counts complete is unacceptable, regardless of context, since many of his supporters will likely understand his assertion as factual rather than predictive.

The goal for this site is nonpartisan advocacy for reason and fairness, and to focus on local matters and less on national politics, so I regret needing to condemn the words of our President. As pledged on this site, we must accept a victory for either candidate once sufficient votes have been counted, but right now it could still be a win for either Trump or Biden. Out of respect for democracy and fairness to every voter, we must condemn anyone who sows unwarranted mistrust in our election process which can threaten the stability of our nation.

What is Biden Saying?

Biden’s campaign manager has said “Joe Biden is on track to win this election and he will be the next president of the United States”. CNN has run a headline suggesting equivalence between Trump and Biden claims, saying “Biden and Trump campaigns both claim to be winning the election”. To be clear, there is a difference between the present participle “winning”, or a campaign giving a future tense speculation that they “will win”, compared to Trump saying in the purportedly factual, past-tense that he “did win”. The former is predicting a win, the latter is asserting the win already happened. Words matter.

Trump’s campaign official has said “the president will win.” In this sense, the campaigns do have some similar claims, and future-tense predictions are more benign. However, Trump himself claimed that he did win, and falsely said that magical, surprise ballot dumps cast after the polls closed are stealing it from him, and that it’s a fraud. There is no equivalence between these words by Trump and those made by Biden.

Recommended reading: AP FACT CHECK: Trump fabricates election corruption

Afterword

Republicans have the right to review election results and ensure no illegal votes were counted. They may pursue legal means to correct any invalidly cast votes, review the process, or call for recounts as allowed. Some of these actions are within reason. We only want legally cast votes to be counted, which is what I pledged on 10/12.

However, unless the President can provide sufficient evidence of the “massive ballot counting abuse” he continues to allege as recently as 11/10, it is unreasonable and unethical for Trump’s campaign to claim he is the real winner and that the election is being stolen from him. So far there has not been evidence of widespread election fraud.