Jack Holmes, writing for Esquire:

This was all by design. His party had matched his rhetoric in the run-up to Election Day with action, as Republican legislatures in key battleground states—like Michigan and Pennsylvania—held fast to a policy, even amid the expected pandemic surge of mail ballots, that officials could not begin counting those votes until Election Day. That made it all the more likely the counting would not be done by Election Night—and that, in the days after, the president could yell that the remaining ballots were fraudulent, and dispatch his lawyers to various courts to ask Republican-appointed judges to throw them out.

The President Is Focusing His Towering and Shameless Mendacity on One Last Job

Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin of the NY _Times_:

Much of the uncertainty hanging over the election arose from the inconsistent or patchwork array of state-level policies hurriedly put in place to enable voting amid a public health disaster. In a number of states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, local Republican officials blocked Democrats’ efforts to make it easier to count ballots cast before Election Day, raising the possibility of a drawn-out count in some of the most important battlegrounds — the very occurrence Mr. Trump protested Wednesday morning.

As America Awaits a Winner, Trump Falsely Claims He Prevailed

The administration didn’t just object to counting ballots past Election Day, it worked to require that districts couldn’t begin counting them until then. Talk about squeezing from both ends.