President Donald Trump, addressing the uncertain election results early Wednesday morning, reminded the nation that he had predicted a contested result since Democrats had begun urging states to send mail-in ballots to millions of voters.
Trump was leading in several key battleground states that had not reported final results because they were waiting to count absentee and mail-in ballots.
In Arizona, Trump was trailing at the time he spoke, because Election Day votes had not yet been counted, while mail-in votes had. The Trump campaign insisted that it could still win Arizona and pushed back against Fox News, which had called the state for Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump spoke in the East Room of the White House shortly after 2:00 a.m. EST, saying that he had anticipated the exact scenario that had unfolded.
“They knew they couldn’t win,” he said, “so they said let’s go to court. “And did I predict this, Newt [Gingrich]? Did i say this?
“I’ve been saying this from the day I heard they were going to send out tens of millions of ballots. I said exactly — because either they were going to win, or if they didn’t win, they’ll take us to court.”
Democrats had urged states to adopt vote-by-mail, ostensibly to prevent the risk of coronavirus transmutation in polling places.
However, many of those states that had never used mail-in ballots on a large scale before suffered logistical problems in primary elections.
Other states with existing vote-by-mail systems sent ballots to registered voters, whether they were requested or not, leading to some ballots being delivered to incorrect addresses, and many others being disqualified.
A review of Trump’s tweets about vote-by-mail suggests that the president was largely correct — he did predict the problem.
For example:
Over time, Twitter began attaching warnings to Trump’s tweets, as in the following examples:
In an earlier speech Wednesday morning, Biden assured his supporters that he would win when all the votes were counted, though Trump was leading in most of the states Biden needed to win.