Sign up for our special edition newsletter to get updates on the 2020 presidential election and more.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the Trump campaign’s legal challenges and said the president still has a path to securing 270 Electoral College votes to win re-election.
Speaking to Fox News Wednesday evening, McEnany said that while the campaign’s legal arm was engaged in an effort to not have votes counted in Pennsylvania if the Postal Service delivered them late, she believed it would not be necessary to use that method because President Trump would win the state anyway.
“We believe if we go to the Supreme Court on this, we don’t even think this will be necessary, let me start there by saying we’re going to win outright,” the White House press secretary told the network.
“But should those three extra days of ballots matter, we believe we’ll prevail at the Supreme Court,” she continued, referencing part of the legal dispute underway in the Keystone State.
McEnany went on to argue that the recounts would also place the Trump campaign back on the pathway to 270 Electoral College votes — despite networks currently pegging Trump between 40 and 50 electors behind former Vice President Joe Biden.
“That’s why we are doing the recounts in Wisconsin, why we’re looking at Michigan as well having the poll observers,” McEnany said. “We’re looking, but we believe the path runs through Arizona, Pennsylvania, keeping Georgia, which we’re already in the lead there.”
The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit Wednesday joining ongoing legal challenges in Pennsylvania and Nevada.
The filings request better ballot observer access for their campaign representatives and also intervene in a case that allowed the state to count ballots up to three days late, as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday, Nov. 3.
With regard to the poll watchers, McEnany explained that election officials in the state had forced some of them to stand several feet away, impacting their ability to actually see what was happening with the counting process.
After facing pushback from host Martha MacCallum on ballots that were cast legally by Americans who wanted their vote counted, McEnany discussed concerns about fraud, specifically in the city of Philadelphia.
“Philadelphia, in particular, has a history of very peculiar results,” the White House press secretary explained. “You had 59 different precincts where Mitt Romney got precisely zero votes [in the 2012 presidential election], which is very unlikely and curious indeed.”
“You had a Democrat individual who was charged for — in 2014, 2015 and in 2016 — stuffing the ballot box with fraudulent ballots. So we want to be on alert.”
With Post wires
