Washington: People in the United States woke up on Wednesday without a clear winner of the country’s presidential elections, as millions of ballots are still being counted in critical battleground states that will ultimately decide the victor.
That did not stop Donald Trump from sowing doubt around the electoral process, however, as the US president falsely declared that delays in declaring a winner are evidence of wide-scale voter fraud.
Legal and elections experts in the US say that there is no evidence to back up Trump’s claims – and taking time to make sure every vote is counted in no way signals that something improper is under way.
“Counting ballots is not fraud. That’s what we do in elections – we count ballots,” said Lonna Atkeson, director of the University of New Mexico’s Center for the Study of Voting, Elections and Democracy.
Atkeson told in a interview on Wednesday that people need to be patient and respect the process, which is “slow and laboured”.
