A defensive President Donald Trump addressed the nation on Thursday night, repeating a number of false claims of election misconduct in various states and even suggesting he’d won the race in Michigan.
He attacked inaccurate pre-election polls, claiming their publishers conspired to underreport Trump’s popularity in order to discourage donations, he suggested widespread voter corruption in multiple states and claimed Republican poll watchers were illegally blocked from observing absentee ballot counting in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
“We were way up in Michigan, won the state,” Trump said, “and that got whittled down.”
According to unofficial Michigan vote totals, Trump lost the state by 145,137 votes.
Biden received 2,791,529, or 50.55% of the votes; Trump logged 2,646,392, or 47.92%.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Trump held a lead in Michigan, but hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots had yet to be counted. Almost 3.3 million of the 5.5 million votes cast for president came by way of absentee ballots, according to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Related: Michigan 2020 live election results: President, Congress and ballot proposals
Detroit poll workers didn’t complete tabulation of the almost 200,000 absentee ballots cast there until Wednesday night.
Detroit, an 80% Black city where Trump only received about 5% of the 250,138 votes -- former Vice President Joe Biden received 94% -- is now a focal point for Trump and his supporters' claims of election fraud.
“In Detroit, there were hours of unexplained delays in delivering many of the votes for counting,” Trump said Thursday. “The final batch did not arrive until (4 a.m.), even though the polls closed at (8 p.m.), so the batches came in and nobody knew where they came from.”
The Secretary of State’s Office on Thursday published a series of “fact checks” related to claims made by Trump and his supporters.
“Michigan’s election clerks count valid ballots that they received at their offices or in their official ballot drop boxes by 8 p.m. on Election Day,” one post said. “Ballots received thereafter, regardless of the postmark, are not counted.”
Trump said absentee voting, which saw massive growth this year amid the coronavirus pandemic, has “destroyed our system” because it’s “too easy to corrupt.”
Trump also claimed his campaign’s poll workers were obstructed while attempting to observe counts of absentee ballots at the TCF Center in Detroit.
“Poll workers in Michigan were duplicating ballots, but when our observers attempted to challenge the activity those poll workers jumped in front of the volunteers to block their view,” Trump said, “so they couldn’t see what they were doing and it became a little bit dangerous.”
Illegible absentee ballots in Michigan are discarded after they’re duplicated by poll workers in a process that must be observed by members of opposing political parties. At the TCF Center this week, many poll watchers were barred from entering the building due to capacity constraints, but not before dozens of Republican and Democratic monitors were allowed inside to observe the process.
Trump supporters who were denied entry by police and security launched into an impromptu protest outside the Downtown Detroit convention center that continued Thursday.
Even though election officials had packed up and left, dozens of Trump supporters and opponents converged at the TCF Center throughout the day and into the night.
About five Trump supporters, including a bearded man with a “Make America Great Again” hat and an American flag slung over his shoulder, faced off across the street with as many as 40 hecklers, many wearing Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump garb.
The confrontation remained mostly calm, aside from a small would-be skirmish that police and security quickly separated.
“It was not a fair and free election this time," said Jason Howland, 44, of Clinton Township, who stood on the Trump supporter side of the street. “When you’re paying very close attention, you wake up in the morning and one guy’s numbers have changed a hundred-and-some-thousand and the other guy’s haven’t moved.”
Howland said all he wants is for all of the ballots to be “verified" by bipartisan poll watchers.
“We need to have a real ability to see the ballots and watch them be counted ... and if were to lose, that’s fine.”
Howland said he returned to the site of the Detroit absentee ballot count with others to remind the public that Trump supporters are not going to give up on the election until there is a fair recount.
“Detroit is another place, and I wouldn’t say it has the best reputation for election integrity,” Trump said Thursday, as he vowed “tremendous litigation” before an election winner is declared.
Related: Fact check: Michigan officials deny counting ballots from dead people
The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Michigan on Wednesday in an attempt to stop vote counting in Michigan. The request was denied by a state judge Thursday, partly because all of the votes had already been counted.
Biden needs to win one of four tightly contested states, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia or Pennsylvania, in order to be declared the winner of the 2020 election.
“As you know, I’ve claimed certain states, he’s claiming some states, and we can both claim the states, but ultimately I have feeling that judges are gong to have to rule,” Trump said Thursday. “But there’s been a lot of shenanigans and we can’t' stand for that in our country.”
More on MLive:
Trump loses battle in Michigan court seeking to stop vote counting
See 2020 election turnout by Michigan county compared to 2016