Trump’s lawyers challenge results in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin

President Trump’s legal team accused Democrats and election officials Thursday of widespread voter fraud that, if rectified, would flip the projected outcome of the Nov. 3 election to a victory for the president.

The president’s attorneys said Democrat-run cities mounted a coordinated effort to disadvantage Republican voters. They also said voting machines used in more than two dozen states were manipulated to trash votes for Mr. Trump and boost presumptive President-elect Joseph R. Biden.

“This is a massive, well-funded, coordinated effort,” Sydney Powell, one of the president’s attorneys, said at a press conference in Washington. “It is of the greatest concern. It is the 1775 of our generation and beyond.”

Rudolph W. Giuliani, leader of the legal team, charged that Democratic-run Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Milwaukee engaged in a coordinated scheme to block Republican poll observers from reviewing mail-in ballots for errors and flaws.

He said there are enough ballots disputed in at least three swing states to reverse the projected win for Mr. Biden. He cited mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that the campaign is challenging through litigation and recount efforts.

“We have more than double the number of votes needed to overturn the election in terms of provable illegal ballots,” he said. “This was a disgraceful thing that was done to this country.”

Though they passionately presented their claims, neither Mr. Giuliani nor Ms. Powell provided hard evidence supporting the accusations of conspiracy or manipulated voting software.

Biden spokesman Mike Gwin dismissed the press conference as a spectacle.

“No matter how hard Trump and the flailing Giuliani try, they cannot overturn the will of the American people, who resoundingly picked Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani said witnesses claim a truck pulled into a counting center in Detroit at 4:30 a.m. after polls closed Nov. 3 with stacks of “Biden ballots.” About 50,000 of those were triple-counted, according to the witnesses.

“These ballots were produced very quickly, very swiftly,” Mr. Giuliani said.

Mr. Trump trails Mr. Biden by about 155,606 votes in Michigan.

Just before the press conference, Mr. Giuliani announced that the campaign was withdrawing a federal lawsuit in Michigan to delay certification of election results. The move followed an attempt by Republican election board members in the Detroit area to reverse certification of the Nov. 3 results.

The two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers blocked the Detroit-area certification Tuesday in a deadlocked 2-2 party-line vote. They later relented and joined a 4-0 vote to certify, though they now claim it was under duress.

They submitted an affidavit to rescind their vote Thursday. State officials said the vote could not be changed and the State Board of Canvassers will vote to confirm results from every county Monday.

The federal lawsuit in Michigan claimed Republican poll watchers were prevented from reviewing mail-in ballots in the Detroit area.

The same legal claim is being made in a federal court in Pennsylvania, contesting roughly 670,000 ballots the campaign said were not properly observed. The president lags behind Mr. Biden by 82,606 votes in Pennsylvania.

The campaign also contested roughly 40,000 ballots in Madison, Wisconsin, and about 60,000 absentee ballots in Milwaukee.

They requested a recount in two of the state’s largest counties. The president is behind in Wisconsin by roughly 20,608 votes.

“If you count the lawful votes, Trump won Wisconsin,” Mr. Giuliani said.

The Trump legal team also took shots at Dominion Voting Systems, which supplied voting machines and tabulation software in more than two dozen states.

The lawyers cited the corporate lineage of Dominion that links it to the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. They also claimed billionaire liberal activist George Soros and the Clinton Foundation were linked to the company.

Ms. Powell said an algorithm used in the software diminished Mr. Trump’s votes while elevating Mr. Biden’s count. She said the same setup was used by South American dictators and corrupt foreign interests to rig elections.

She said they have mathematical evidence in some states of votes for Mr. Trump being trashed and that poll workers testified they were shown how to dispose of Trump votes to add Biden votes.

“The machines were easily accessible to hackers,” Ms. Powell said. “A full-scale criminal investigation needs to be taken immediately.”

Karl Rove,who was a White House chief political strategist for President George W. Bush, said the Trump team needs to produce evidence to back up such serious claims.

“These are serious — I think somewhat strange accusations but serious — and now both Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell have an obligation to go to court and prove them,” he said on Fox News, where he is a paid contributor. “They have an obligation to go to court and prove these, or the American people will have every reason to question their credibility.”

Nearly three weeks after the election, Mr. Trump appears far from his goal of reversing the projected outcome. He trails in not just one, but a handful of battleground states.

The most likely path to victory for Mr. Trump would be through Pennsylvania. If Mr. Trump prevails there, he would then have to do the same in at least two other states to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

Ilya Shapiro, publisher of the Cato Institute’s Supreme Court Review, said Mr. Trump’s attorneys have been “grasping at straws.” To throw out election results for a presidential election, Mr. Shapiro said, they would need “airtight proof of massive, systematic irregularities.”

Curt Levey, president of the conservative Committee for Justice, viewed the press conference as successful. He said Mr. Giuliani presented hard numbers from Michigan and Wisconsin that suggest there could be enough to flip those battleground states, potentially upending Mr. Biden’s Electoral College path.

“Now they are showing us evidence — that doesn’t mean it is going to be enough to convince a court, but they are showing us evidence sufficient to overturn the election,” Mr. Levey said. “In my mind, it increased my confidence that it’s winnable.”

⦁ Seth McLaughlin and David Sherfinski contributed to this report.