- The Russian government will not acknowledge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 US election, the Kremlin’s spokesperson said early Monday.
- “There are ongoing legal processes,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement. “We believe the correct thing to do is wait for the official election result.”
- Biden was declared the victor in the presidential race by Insider on Friday and other outlets the next day.
- But President Donald Trump has refused to concede the election, making bogus claims of widespread voter fraud and election-rigging.
- Trump’s campaign has also filed a flurry of lawsuits in battleground states, though legal experts say they have little chance of reversing the results.
- Biden’s projected victory is unwelcome news for Russia, which meddled in the 2016 and 2020 races in Trump’s favor, the US intelligence community determined.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
The Russian government will not acknowledge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 US election, the Kremlin’s spokesperson said early Monday.
“There are ongoing legal processes,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement. “We believe the correct thing to do is wait for the official election result.”
Biden is projected to win at least 279 electoral votes with victories in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, all of which President Donald Trump won in the 2016 election. The number needed to clinch the presidency is 270.
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, has refused to concede the election, filing a flurry of lawsuits in at least five battleground states to contest the results.
Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have circulated bogus claims of widespread voter fraud, election-rigging, and a conspiracy between the Democratic Party and “big media” to tilt the race in Biden’s favor. Trump also falsely declared himself the winner shortly after Election Day even though millions of ballots were yet to be counted.
There is no empirical evidence or data suggesting that the election was rigged against Trump or that widespread voter fraud occurred.
None of the slew of lawsuits the campaign has filed make claims of voter fraud or election conspiracies; instead, they’re focused on delaying ballot-counting or discarding a small number of ballots in states that would have no effect on the final result because of Biden’s margins of victory.
Overall, as Business Insider previously reported, this election was among the safest and most secure in part because of the use of paper ballots and voting machines with verifiable paper trails.
Paul Nakasone, the director of the National Security Agency, also said there was less foreign interference this time than there was in the 2018 midterms.
That said, the US was bracing for foreign interference in the electoral process to ramp up after the race’s winner was projected, particularly if it took a few days to call the results, Nakasone said last month.
The New York Times also reported that officials believe Russia will interfere to help Trump in part by “exacerbating disputes around the results.”
The US intelligence community determined that Russia waged an organized and elaborate campaign to interfere in the 2016 election to propel then-Republican candidate Trump to the Oval Office. Over the summer, the intelligence community concluded that Russia was once again meddling in Trump’s favor.
The majority of world leaders have congratulated Biden and the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, on winning the election. But Putin and some other nationalist strongmen, like China’s Xi Jinping and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have not yet acknowledged Biden’s victory.
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