Washington DC [US]: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the running mate of Vice President Kamala Harris, expressed optimism that former President Donald Trump will accept the election results, even if he loses, CNN reported.
When asked by reporters before Walz boarded his flight from Pennsylvania to Washington, DC, on Tuesday if he believes Trump will concede the election if he loses, Walz said he believes Trump will concede, if “history is … any indicator.”
Walz also pledged to “shake hands and work for the winner” if Harris loses.
This statement comes amidst concerns over potential disruptions to the electoral process, including bomb threats to polling locations across several states.
Trump and other Republicans repeatedly suggested they would accept the results of the presidential election if there was no evidence of fraud, as per CNN.
Trump spread false claims of voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election as a pretense to attempt to overthrow the results of the election.
Walz said he did not speak to Harris in the last 24 hours but praised her remarks at her final campaign rally in Philadelphia on Monday, as per CNN.
Meanwhile, talking about the bomb threats in various polling locations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Tuesday (local time) that bomb threats to polling locations across several states appear to have originated from Russian email domains. The FBI added that none of the emails were credible threats, as per CNN.
“The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far,” CNN quoted the agency’s statement.
US intelligence officials were examining an email account using a Russian internet domain as the potential source of non-credible bomb threats made when Georgia went to polls on Tuesday.
Several non-credible bomb threats briefly disrupted voting at two polling places in Georgia, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, as per CNN.
“We’ve heard some threats that were of Russian origin. I don’t know how to describe that that’s viable – we don’t think they are, but in the interest of public safety, we always check that out, and we’ll just continue to be very responsible when we hear about stuff like that,” Raffensperger said. “We identified the source, and it was from Russia,” CNN quoted him as saying.
The presidential race between Harris and Trump is going down to the wire, with more states functionally tied in polls at this point than in any comparable election. Over 77.3 million people have now voted ahead of Election Day on Tuesday, just over half of the total ballots cast in 2020.
The battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are expected to be pivotal to the path to victory.
Harris and Trump tied with three votes each in the tiny New Hampshire community of Dixville Notch, which opened and closed its poll just after midnight ET in a decades-old tradition.