"There's nothing in the courts to stop it right now. A judge would have to find a clear reason."
That reason, according to Trump, is voting fraud. After a long campaign of warning, without evidence, of ballots dumped in rivers and otherwise underhandedly manipulated to turn blue, the president told the nation overnight they had been the victim of a "major fraud". His evidence this time appeared to be the rapidly tightening race itself.
"We were getting ready to win this election," Trump said, before several key state races began tilting for Biden. "Frankly, we did win this election." (In a dramatic twist late on Friday AEST, Biden took the lead in the knife-edge vote count for key Republican stronghold, Georgia.) Trump has even declared pre-election polling by the media, which is conducted for every presidential race, was tantamount to electoral interference.
Sometimes things do go a little awry during voting. On election day this year a burst water main in Georgia delayed vote counting from some counties, for example. At another, there are reports a machine ran out of ink. There were long lines and some reports of voter intimidation, after Trump urged his supporters “observe” those casting ballots, but mostly election day ran smoothly.
The only evidence of voting fraud or tampering so far are two cases of Republican voters attempting to vote twice, disclosed by officials in Nevada and Pennsylvania.
But in that extraordinary speech on November 6 AEST, President Trump doubled down on his claims that the Democrats are trying to "steal" and "rig" the election as mail-in ballots "mysteriously appeared" and whittled down his leads in key states. Without evidence, he launched a tirade of allegations against electoral officials - many of them in states with Republicans running the show such as Georgia - and claimed that mail-in voting, a well-established system, "makes people corrupt even if they aren't by nature".
Officials across the country have hit back and begun to debunk some of the wild claims from Trump's campaign, including allegations of dead people voting in Nevada.One viral video allegedly depicting 80 Trump ballots being set alight, shared on Twitter by US President Donald Trump's son Eric, has already been ruled a fake by the city of Virginia Beach where it was filmed, which said: "They are NOT official ballots, they are sample ballots." The giveaway? The sample ballots did not have a bar code.
Adams says that when it comes to voter disenfranchisement, the odd box of ballots left unopened usually never makes a difference to the final result. The real tactic that changes the map is stopping certain people from voting in the first place.
"You hear stories here and there of ... human error. But the real problems are out of the Republican playbook, finding ways to stop people [likely to vote] Democrat, throwing up hurdles, like overzealous ID checks, at polls."
Of course, this year the expanded rules to allow for more mail-in voting during COVID has opened the doors for more legal challenges.
There's already been a suite of challenges in many states by Republicans keen to have mail-ins thrown out, including five heard by the Supreme Court in the past fortnight. Some states are counting ballots received up to three days after election day so long as they are clearly postmarked for November 3.
Read more here.