US President Donald Trump repeated unproven claims of voter fraud in a 46-minute-long video address posted on social media on Wednesday.
US President-elect Joe Biden won the November 3 election, but Trump has refused to concede and continues to argue without evidence that there were irregularities with voting booths and mail-in ballots.
“Within days after the election we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint a winner, even while many key states were still being counted,” Trump said in the remarks from the White House.
“The constitutional process must be allowed to continue. We’re going to defend the honesty of the vote by ensuring that every legal ballot is counted.”
Trump said some ballots were cast on behalf of dead people and that ballot boxes were illegally stuffed, despite election officials maintaining the vote was carried out without incident.
US Attorney General William Barr, an ally of the president, said a day earlier the US Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of serious voter fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election.
The Trump campaign has launched numerous lawsuits to have mail-in ballots thrown out in key swing states, almost all of which have been dismissed due to a lack of evidence.
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Trump has largely shunned public events in recent weeks and, at the few appearances he has made, he has refused to take questions from the press.
But he announced on Wednesday plans to hold a rally in the southern state of Georgia, where there are two Senate seats and control of the upper chamber of Congress up for grabs in run-off elections next month.
It will mark his first such event since the election.
The announcement by Trump, which indicate a rally this weekend, comes after he spent weeks bashing the process in Georgia, alleging fraud and effectively claiming that the state is unable to hold a fair election.
He has even called on the governor of Georgia, a Republican, to cancel the two run-off races scheduled for January 5.
If Republicans win just one of the two races, they will maintain control of the Senate. If the Democrats win both, the upper chamber will be split, but the vice president can act as a tie breaker.
Trump’s repeated false claims about Georgia have drawn the ire of Republican officials in the state.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager and a staunch conservative, blasted the Republican president this week, saying he was inciting violence.
“Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right,” Sterling said in blistering remarks aimed at the President.
Source : GNA
