Republicans React To Trump Election Fraud Claim

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Several Republican lawmakers and commentators on Wednesday expressed distaste for President Donald Trump’s impatience and disregard for the electoral process after he claimed during a speech that counting votes after Election Day was a "fraud" on the American public.

"There’s just no basis to make that argument tonight,” former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told reporters in a segment on ABC News on Tuesday evening.

“I disagree with what he did tonight. There comes a point where you have to let the process play itself out before you judge it to have been flawed,” Christie said. “If there is a flaw in it later, he has undercut his own credibility in calling attention to that flaw, so I think it’s a bad strategic decision; it’s a bad political decision.”

U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Virginia echoed Christie's remarks, saying during an interview with CNN he was “very distressed” by what he heard.

Read more: What To Know If Presidential Election Results Go To Supreme Court

During the speech, Trump said votes being counted after polls closed on election night were “a major fraud on our nation,” suggesting fraud was the result of a major push for mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“The idea of using the word ‘fraud’ — that there is fraud being committed by people counting votes — I think, is wrong,” he said. “I understand the president feels like it’s a grievance against him and ... this is another sample of the media not treating him fairly. I could not disagree more in this case.”

Politicians were not the only ones to criticize Trump’s assertion that the election was being conducted unfairly.

FOX News Chris Wallace, who moderated the first presidential debate in September, said, “This is an extremely flammable situation, and the president just threw a match into it.”

“He hasn’t won these states. Nobody is saying he has won the states. The states haven’t said that he’s won,” Wallace said. “This goes right back to what Joe Biden said, which is that the president doesn’t get to say that he’s won states. The American people get to say it, and the state officials get to declare it.”

During his address, Trump also claimed he will go to the U.S. Supreme Court to put a stop to the vote counting.

It is unclear whether the president was referring to in-person voting or the tabulation of votes that had already been cast, but polls had already closed by the time his speech began.

Also, the counting of ballots after Election Day has been a legally permitted practice in many states and could take days or weeks to complete.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign manager, said in a statement to the Associated Press that the campaign has already anticipated potential legal moves and has a team in place to respond.

“If the president makes good on his threat to go to court to try to prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort,” Dillon said. “And they will prevail.”

Trump could be referencing the Supreme Court decision that handed George W. Bush the 2000 election.

John Bolton, former national security adviser to Trump, said in an interview with Sky News that the circumstances leading to the 2000 decision are unlikely to be re-created in this year’s election because it focused only on ballots in Florida, not at the electoral process nationwide.

“Challenges that would come to the Supreme Court have to work their way up through a variety of lower courts,” Bolton said. “They have to be based on violations of state law or the federal Constitution. The Supreme Court cannot reach out and decide the elections, despite what President Trump said last night.”