There’s no proof to help claims that election observers have been blocked from counting rooms.

HomeUS Politics

There’s no proof to help claims that election observers have been blocked from counting rooms.

On Twitter and in interviews, President Trump and his supporters have alleged that his marketing campaign observers have been blocked from ballot-c


On Twitter and in interviews, President Trump and his supporters have alleged that his marketing campaign observers have been blocked from ballot-counting rooms, hindering their potential to witness and report a number of cases of what the Trump marketing campaign has baselessly claimed was widespread election fraud that has marred the outcomes.

“THE OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED INTO THE COUNTING ROOMS,” Mr. Trump alleged in a tweet on Saturday. “BAD THINGS HAPPENED WHICH OUR OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE.”

The cost was with none foundation in reality, and was, in actuality, contradicted by a number of of Mr. Trump’s personal authorized filings.

In circumstances that his marketing campaign introduced in Nevada and Pennsylvania — one dismissed, the opposite pending — it acknowledged that its observers have been certainly current within the counting rooms. His attorneys have been, quite, asking the courts to drive election officers to permit Mr. Trump’s observers to get even nearer views of the counting exercise.

A decide within the Nevada case dismissed the bid, ruling that Mr. Trump’s attorneys “did not show” that native election officers “interfered with any proper they or anybody else has an observer.” Within the Philadelphia case, the Trump marketing campaign succeeded in forcing metropolis elections officers to permit observers to be as much as six ft from counting tables, versus the roughly 20-foot commentary line officers had beforehand set. However throughout a listening to for a federal model of that swimsuit on Thursday, Decide Paul Diamond of the U.S. District Courtroom for the Jap District of Pennsylvania pressed a lawyer for Mr. Trump on whether or not the marketing campaign’s observers did, in reality, have entry to the power. The lawyer mentioned, grudgingly, that there have been “a nonzero quantity” of individuals within the room. (Within the curiosity of expediting the case, Decide Diamond pushed the Philadelphia board to conform to an expanded variety of observers.)

A case the Trump marketing campaign introduced in Chatham County, Ga., was, in reality, based mostly on a Trump observer’s allegation that he had seen staff rely some 53 ballots that weren’t legitimate — a skinny cost that the observer couldn’t help in courtroom; the decide threw out the swimsuit on Thursday.

Mr. Trump and his allies have seized on images of election staff at one level utilizing cardboard to dam home windows of a big counting room contained in the TFC Heart in Detroit, alleging that staff there have been protecting up nefarious exercise.

In actual fact, The Detroit Free Press reported, the cardboard was meant to dam the view of boisterous protesters exterior the room who have been making an attempt to {photograph} and video the employees dealing with ballots with delicate private details about voter preferences. On the time, The Free Press reported, there have been 134 Republican observers contained in the counting space, together with the same variety of Democratic observers.



www.nytimes.com