The tallying of hundreds of thousands of ballots Wednesday and Thursday has led to sparring sentiments about counting absentee ballots, with President Donald Trump adding to the melee with a tweet Thursday that read: “Stop the Count.”
In states including Georgia, Arizona and Michigan, poll workers are still tenaciously processing ballots that came in prior to Election Day but could not be processed until Tuesday. With more than 100 million absentee ballots to tally and some ballots requiring further review, the path to determining the electoral and popular votes has taken days rather than hours.
As of Thursday afternoon, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina were still working to report unofficial final results. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s victories in states including Michigan left him at 264, leaving just a small margin to reach the required 270 electoral votes for victory.
Since Election Day, Trump has contested the ballot counting, filing lawsuits in a number of states and mocking absentee ballots as “surprise” ballots.
“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court — we want all voting to stop,” Trump said early Wednesday.
The president also questioned how he was leading “solidly” in many key states, but his lead “magically disappeared” due to what he called “surprise ballot dumps” being counted. It appears that he is referring to the counts going on across the country of the more than 100 million early and absentee votes that occurred prior to Election Day.
“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the “pollsters” got it completely & historically wrong,” he tweeted.
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His three-word tweet about ending counting sparked a trending hashtag and was in direct contrast to Biden’s Twitter comments on the tedious counting process.
A few hours after posting, Trump’s tweet had been quote tweeted more than 224,000 times, with some sharing the same frustration and suspicions regarding the counting. Some made claims that counting had been falsified.
Overwhelmingly, Twitter users expressed frustration that the president and his supporters would want ballot counting to cease. Several panned the criticism of ballot counting as hypocritical, since early Wednesday Trump originally complained about votes not being counted extensively.
The president followed up Thursday afternoon with “stop the fraud,” which Twitter has flagged as distributing “disputed” and “misleading” information."
The “Stop the Count” topic trended throughout Thursday, while a related topic, “Count Every Vote,” also began trending.
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