Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said President Donald Trump is “100 percent within his legal rights” to investigate allegations of voter fraud while speaking on the Senate floor Monday.
“No states have yet certified their election results,” McConnell said. “The core principle here is not complicated. In the United States of America, all legal ballots must be counted, any illegal ballots must not be counted.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said President Trump was completely within his rights to look into ‘irregularities’ from last week’s election and did not acknowledge Biden as president-elect or Harris as vice president-elect https://t.co/9lJLRAK7ks pic.twitter.com/QhoWAVEYrL
— Reuters (@Reuters) November 9, 2020
“The process should be transparent or observable by all sides and the courts are here to work through concerns. Our institutions are actually built for this,” he continued. “President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options. If any major irregularity has occurred this time … every single American should want them to be brought to light. And if Democrats feel confident they have not occurred, they should have no reason to fear any extra scrutiny.” (RELATED: REPORT: Donald Trump To Contest Election With Campaign-Like Rallies – Without Trump)
“Let’s not have any lectures, no lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election,” he concluded.
The Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits across the country in battleground states like Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona.
In Pennsylvania, the campaign sued to stop counting votes that arrived late or were missing postmarks and signatures. Unlike other lawsuits launched by the campaign, Pennsylvania has been embattled in a suit with the state’s GOP. The GOP has argued that the aforementioned policies, made possible by an executive order from the governor, overstepped the governor’s legal authority. The state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state’s executive orders, according to Vox. The conservative Justices said there was a “strong likelihood” the state’s Supreme Court ruling was unconstitutional.
In the week prior to Election Day, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar to keep all late ballots and ballots with missing signatures separate and not counted. Boockvar walked back on her agreement with the court and ordered the votes counted. The court will now decide whether those ballots – which were counted – are legally valid.
The Trump campaign launched another lawsuit against Philadelphia election officials arguing they were not allowed to observe the voting process. However, a federal judge denied an emergency request from the campaign to stop counting ballots, according to Reuters.
In Arizona the campaign is arguing that Maricopa County wrongly rejected votes cast on Election Day, according to The Hill.
In Georgia the campaign argued that late-arriving ballots were being mixed in with valid ballots and asked a judge to order the late ballots separate and not counted. The case was dismissed on Thursday.