‘Every legal - not illegal - vote should be counted’: Melania

The United States First Lady Melania Trump asked Sunday that "every legal vote" be counted and called to protect the country's democracy after media projections gave the election victory to the Democratic candidate Joe Biden, reported EFE-EPA.

"The American people deserve fair elections. Every legal - not illegal - vote should be counted. We must protect our democracy with complete transparency," the first lady wrote on Twitter.

The wife of President Donald Trump spoke after Biden was declared the winner of the Nov. 3 elections, a result the current president refused to recognize.

Trump demanded Thursday on his Twitter account that election officials "STOP THE COUNT!" in capital letters, and later wrote that "ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!"

The Republican's campaign spokesman Jason Miller told the press that the president does not want ballots that arrived by mail to continue to be counted, a resource 65 million Americans used to avoid crowds on election day due to the novel coronavirus.

Trump has taken a position against voting by mail because data shows Democrats used the option in a higher proportion to Republicans, who preferred to wait for election day.

On Saturday, Twitter, Trump's preferred social network, warned of the veracity of the president’s claims in which he declared himself the winner of the elections when the country's leading media organizations had projected Biden's victory.

“Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process,” the platform appended all of the president’s unverified claims.

In his message, Trump continued the accusations of previous days, according to which there had been irregularities in the voting and in the scrutiny, in spite of any evidence.

The president alleged in a thread of tweets that observers were not allowed to witness the count and that he won the election with 71 million votes.

Twitter flagged also flagged these posts, a recurrent theme with dozens of tweets from the president during the last four days, in which Trump has insisted on claiming victory and launched fraud accusations.

Biden appeared Saturday in his victory speech as the conciliatory leader who will seek to end polarization in the country and said it was time to “heal the United States."

Biden's victory sparked celebrations in different cities countrywide, although many Republican supporters and the president – who returned Sunday to his golf club on the outskirts of Washington for the second day in a row – refused to acknowledge the results.