-Observers find no evidence in Trump’s fraud claims
Foreign Desk Report
NEW YORK: Protesters across the US, most aligned with Democrats and progressives, turned out on Wednesday evening to demand that officials “count every vote”, according to media reports.
In New York City, thousands marched past boarded-up luxury stores on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, as the presidential race remained too close to call and ballots were still being tallied in key battleground states.
Organizers called it the “Protect the Results” rally. The march was largely peaceful, though police made at least 20 arrests after a smaller, rowdier group began protesting against police misconduct.
Similar protests took place in at least a half-dozen cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and San Diego. Demonstrators gathered outside Dallas City Hall in Texas. In Chicago, protesters demanding a complete count marched through downtown and along a street across the river from Trump Tower.
The demonstrations came as President Donald Trump threatened to sue his way to the presidency, launching lawsuits on Wednesday to halt vote-counting in three battleground states. It is not clear that the challenges will alter the election result.
Many of the protests were organized by local groups affiliated with Protect the Results, a coalition of grassroots organizations and labour unions.In Michigan, after a rightwing, anti-lockdown group crowded outside a ballot-counting site in Detroit, demonstrators marched to demand that officials complete the count.
Police arrested dozens of protesters in Minneapolis who were demanding action on a range of issues including policing, climate change and immigration, according to local media reports. The demonstration was reportedly planned prior to Tuesday’s election. Arrests were also made in Los Angeles and in Portland, Oregon. While in response to the Trump’s claims, he head of an international delegation monitoring the U.S. election says his team has no evidence to support President Donald Trump’s claims about alleged fraud involving mail-in absentee ballots.
Michael Georg Link, a German lawmaker who heads an observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told German public broadcaster rbb Thursday that “on the election day itself, we couldn’t see any violations” at the U.S. polling places they visited. Link said he was “very surprised” by Trump’s claims about postal ballot fraud because the United States has a long history of this method of voting going back to the 19th century.
“We looked into this. We found no violations of the rules whatsoever,” Link told rbb. He said neither U.S. election observers nor media found any evidence of fraud either, though the OSCE team on Wednesday repeated long-standing concerns about disenfranchisement of some voters and the distorting effects of campaign finance laws.
Link said there were some instances of errors being made “but no systemic interference or even manipulation with the postal ballots whatsoever.”
Trump has for weeks argued that mail voting is prone to fraud. On Wednesday morning, with his lead in key battlegrounds slipping, Trump claimed efforts were being made to steal his victory and prematurely declared himself the winner. “That is something that does need to be described as breaking a taboo,” Link said of Trump’s effort to stop the count. “He has neither the right nor the possibility to do this. Responsibility for the count lies exclusively with states.”
The Vienna-based OSCE, of which the United States is a member, conducts observer missions at major elections in all of its member countries.
Earlier, the Republican campaign filed suit in a bid to halt the count, demanding Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state allow in more inspectors.
The Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, insisted both parties and the public had been given access to the tallying “using a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that all ballots are counted fairly and accurately”.
The prolonged task of counting this year’s deluge of mail-in votes had raised fears of widespread civil unrest, but so far that scenario has not come to pass.
