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With Election Results Still Unknown, Cincinnati Demonstrators Call For All Votes To Be Counted

piatt park election protest
Ronny Salerno
/
WVXU
The rally was held in response to Donald Trump's unfounded claims of vote rigging and his supporters' demands that vote counts end.

As the world awaits vote tabulation in four states, activists in Cincinnati say they don't want to see the election stolen. At a Defend the Vote rally in Piatt Park Wednesday night, some speakers say they think Donald Trump will try.

The rally was held in response to Donald Trump's unfounded claims of vote rigging and his supporters' demands that vote counts end. Demonstrators say they want every vote counted in this election.

"He's posting tweets, trying to invalidate mail-in ballots," Emma Wilson says. "He wants to take this all the way to the reactionary Supreme Court. No matter what, Trump has shown us he's not trying to accept defeat." 

She says if Trump loses and refuses to leave office, people need to shut the country down with demonstrations, student walk-outs and strikes.

piatt park election protest
Credit Ronny Salerno / WVXU
/
WVXU
Demonstrators gathered at Piatt Park a day after Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020, when the nation still did not know who won the election - President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden.

Wilson says Democrats share some of the blame for a contentious race. She says Democrats ran an uninspiring candidate, Joe Biden, against an incumbent with the lowest approval rating, and didn't win in a landslide.

Daniel Whitford with Cincinnati Socialist Alternative says in addition to getting all the votes counted, they want an end to the Electoral College. He says one person-one vote is how democracy is supposed to work.

He says if the final result is that the president is re-elected fairly, they will accept the results.

"If he wins then we will be doing the same thing that we've been for the last four years, and longer: mobilizing our communities to fight for those policies, to continue to push for worker control, pushing for unions, those sort of things," Whitford says.

He says there were a total of four separate demonstrations all planned around Downtown on Wednesday, all protesting interference in the electoral process. He says some organizers decided to postpone their actions to see how the election turned out.

Bill Rinehart started his radio career as a disc jockey in 1990. In 1994, he made the jump into journalism and has been reporting and delivering news on the radio ever since.