Protests planned across U.S. as Philadelphia officials urged calm amid ballot counting and release of Walter Wallace Jr. bodycam video
As organizers planned more than a hundred election events around the country to “protect the results,” all eyes shifted to Philadelphia Wednesday.
Protesters carrying “Count Every Vote” banners marched near where the pivotal city’s all-important mail ballots were being counted. Just blocks away, police officials announced the release of the bodycam video from the fatal shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. last week.
“I think what occurred here is heartbreaking,” District Attorney Larry Krasner said at a press conference. “Honor the memory of Walter Wallace by not tearing up the city.”
Wallace, 27, was suffering a mental health crisis when he was fatally shot by police Oct. 26 on a Philadelphia street.
The shooting, caught on bystander video, led to several nights of protests.
Philadelphia officials urged calm as the city also became an epicenter of the U.S. presidential election with more than a million mail-in ballots still being counted and a rich pot of 20 electoral votes to award the winner.
Gov. Tom Wolf said Wednesday that Pennsylvania got “a late start on the counting process” because “unusual rules” in the state barred it from even prepping mail-in ballots for machines before the polls closed Tuesday night.
President Trump had no path to victory without Pennsylvania Wednesday, leading him to prematurely declare victory in the state even though the remaining ballots were expected to favor Biden.
Wednesday’s Count the Vote action in Philadelphia was organized by Indivisible, one of the groups behind Protect the Results, the national project organizing more than a hundred demonstrations over the next week.
“The American people have made their will known, and it’s incredibly important over the coming hours and days that we count every single vote in every single state,” Ryan Thomas, a spokesperson with Protect the Results, told the Daily News.
“No efforts to undermine the election can go unanswered,” he said. “It’s important that the American people send a clear message to not only election officials but to the media and Donald Trump himself that every single vote must be counted.”
In Washington D.C., hundreds gathered Tuesday night amid a largely peaceful protest that police later linked to an early morning, non-fatal stabbing incident just blocks from the White House. Organizers with ShutDownDC planned another evening rally Wednesday.
The group retweeted video earlier in the day Wednesday showing the release of one of its protesters who had been arrested by police.
“Who keeps us safe?” one of the organizers chanted in the video posted by Deadspin journalist Chuck Modi.
“We keep us safe,” the group chanted back.
A ShutDownDC march earlier Wednesday included a banner that read “The World is Watching” and a giant inflatable earth that rolled through the streets, larger than a car.
The RNC has been one of the worst enablers of Trump and his endless abuses. They’re going to fight tooth and nail to swing this election for him but we know that #WeThePeople are the ones who decide. We’re paying them a visit to demand they #TellTheTruth.#CountEveryVote pic.twitter.com/Gx4xjyGXoY
— ShutDownDC (@ShutDown_DC) November 4, 2020
