Baselessly claiming “irregularities” in the vote-counting process, the Trump campaign on Wednesday afternoon demanded a recount in the key battleground of Wisconsin as both CNN and the Associated Press called the razor-close state for Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
“There have been reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results,” Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement as the president continued to spread falsehoods about the election on social media.
“The president is well within the threshold to request a recount and we will immediately do so,” said Stepien.
In Wisconsin, a state Trump narrowly won in 2016, a recount is automatically conducted if the margin is less than 0.25 percentage points. If the margin is under one percentage point, candidates can request a recount that they must finance.
According to the New York Times tally as of Wednesday afternoon, Biden leads Trump in Wisconsin by just over 20,500 votes—a margin of 0.6 percentage points. Times reporter Reid Epstein noted that a statewide recount in Wisconsin in 2016 “increased Trump’s margin by 131 votes.”
As media outlets called Wisconsin for the former vice president, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement that “while the counts are still continuing, our position remains the same: we feel good about what we are seeing.”
“We will win Wisconsin and Michigan,” Dillon said. “We feel confident about Pennsylvania. The vice president has a historic national popular vote count—more than any candidate in history—and will flip at least three 2016 Trump states (four, if you count Nebraska-02).”
This story originally appeared on Common Dreams. You can read it here.
