US Congress prepared if poll results are disputed: Pelosi

WASHINGTON: Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has said that Congress was prepared to decide the outcome of the presidential election, which will take place on Tuesday if the results were disputed.

According to the US political system, if there isn’t a clear winner by electoral vote, the House then chooses the next President, The Hill news website reported.”We understand what the law is and the pre-eminence of the role of Congress and specifically the House of Representatives when it comes to counting the votes. “We’re ready. We’re prepared. We’ve been ready for a while because we see this irresponsibility of the President, his disrespect for the Constitution, for our democracy and for the integrity of our elections. So we’re ready for him,” the veteran Democrat was quoted as saying in an NPR public radio station interview on Monday.

Pelosi’s remarks came a day after the Axios news outlet published a report on Sunday saying that the President has privately discussed plans to declare victory on Tuesday night even though it might take a few days for all mail-in ballots to be counted in some states, reports Xinhua news agency. As some states do not allow processing mail-in ballots until Election Day, such as key swing state Pennsylvania, analysts have warned that the winner of the presidential election may still be unknown when polling is over, and the final results could be delayed for days.

But while speaking to reporters after arriving in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Sunday, Trump claimed the Axios report as was “false”, while noting that he thinks “it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election”. On October 29, the Supreme Court ruled that Pennsylvania election officials can accept absentee ballots arriving three days after election day, handing Democrats a victory in a legal fight, and prompting criticism from Trump.

The President added he thought it was “terrible when we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers”. According to the latest tally from the US Elections Project, voters have already cast more than 98 million ballots in early voting ahead of Election Day. That figure, including more than 35 million in-person votes and nearly 63 million returned mail-in ballots, represents more than 71 per cent of the total votes counted in the 2016 general elections, the data showed.

Besides the Trump-Biden race, all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate will also be in the fray on Tuesday. More than a dozen state and territorial governorships, among many other state and local posts, will also be contested.