The results of the US election are still unclear today as Joe Biden inches towards victory with wins in several key swing states by razor-thin margins – while Trump launches lawsuits to try and overturn those results.
As things stand, Biden needs to claim just one more state to win the White House – a win that could come in the midwestern state of Nevada where he currently holds a narrow lead, with counting due to resume Thursday.
It comes after states that showed healthy early lead for Trump – Wisconsin, and Michigan – were eventually declared for Biden after mail-in ballots had been counted.
Georgia and Pennsylvania, another two states that showed early leads for Trump, also appear to be tipping Biden’s way, with counting also ongoing in North Carolina, where Trump is holding on by a razor-thin margin.
However, the picture is complicated by the fact that Arizona, a key battleground state that was called early for Biden, appears to be heading in the opposite direction.
Biden once held the lead by 200,000 votes, but that is now down to around 13,000. If Trump can take it back, then Biden’s win is far from assured.
On Wednesday afternoon, Biden all but declared he’d win the election, as Wisconsin and Michigan were called in his favor.
With Michigan – and with Arizona called for Biden by some networks – the former vice president was just 6 electoral votes away from the 270 he needs to claim the White House.
If he can get any one of the four remaining states to tilt his way – Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia or Pennsylvania – he will win.
Trump will only gain a second term if all four go his way. Trump has been up by around 76,000 votes in North Carolina.
Throughout the day, his lead in Pennsylvania has gotten smaller. It was at around 212,000 votes around 8 p.m. Wednesday night. Outstanding ballots in the Keystone State were coming from Democratic areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and they were mail-in, which also favored Biden.
Biden has been leading in Nevada by a slim margin – 7,647 – but more votes need to be counted there.
Another drop is expected at 12 p.m. EST Thursday.
It means America is inching closer to an election result but still does not have one almost 24 hours after the first polls closed thanks to record voter turnout, which is slowing the counting process.
President Trump netted 13,644 votes in Arizona when Maricopa County released additional election results on Wednesday night but it wasn’t enough to overcome Biden’s lead in the state.
Biden’s lead in Arizona has shrunk to about 13,000 votes. The Associated Press and Fox News has called the state for the Democratic contender but the Trump campaign was pushing for that decision to be recalled, arguing they would pick up enough votes to win when more results were announced.
But the results coming out of Marciopa will not help the president’s cause. Marciopa will release another round of results later Wednesday night.
Maricopa is the largest county in Arizona, home to Phoenix and 62% of the state’s 7.28 million residents. A candidate cannot win the state without it. Biden leads in Maricopa County by approximately 85,000 votes.
The President is demanding a recount in Wisconsin and he has filed lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania to halt counting, claiming his people have not been allowed to oversee the process and ensure it is being carried out fairly.
Biden at a press conference on Wednesday, was unperturbed by Trump’s last-ditch efforts to snatch back the likelihood of a second term.
‘After a long night of counting it’s clear we are winning enough states to win the presidency. I am not here to declare that we won but I am here to report that when the count is finished we believe we will be the winners.
‘We have won Wisconsin by 20,000 votes. In Michigan, we lead by over 35,000 votes and its growing. We have a substantially bigger margin than Trump won Michigan in 2016.
‘Michigan will complete its vote soon. I feel very good about Pennsylvania. Virtually all remaining ballots to be counted are cast by mail and we’ve been winning 78% of the votes by mail in PA.
‘We flipped Arizona and the 2nd district in Nebraska. We won the majority of the American people and every indication is that the majority will grow.
‘Senator Harris and I are on track to win more votes than any ticket in the history of this country – over 70million votes. I’m very proud of our campaign,’ he said.
‘Only three presidential campaigns in the past have defeated the incumbent president. When it’s finished, God willing, we’ll be the fourth. This is a major achievement.’
Biden said that after the election is resolved, he would help ‘lower the temperature’ and unite the country, though he said he wasn’t naive to how ‘deep and hard the opposing views are.’
‘To make progress we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies, we are not enemies,’ Biden said.
‘What brings us together as Americans is so much stronger than anything that can tear us apart.’
At the end of his speech he stated, ‘Now, every vote must be counted.’
‘No one is going to take our democracy away from us – not now, not ever,’ he added, a statement clearly aimed at Trump.
The count is ongoing but in Detroit, angry crowds are demanding that it stop.
They are being stopped from entering the building – where volunteers are racing to tally up the votes – by police.
Volunteers have started boarding up windows in the counting center.
As his chances at victory shrank on Wednesday, Trump’s campaign set forth their plan to undermine the results which includes;
Demanding a recount in Wisconsin, despite Biden winning by more than 20,000 votes which represent around 0.6% of the vote; it is within Wisconsin’s recount rules which allow for anything within a 1 point margin to qualify for a recount
Filing a lawsuit in Michigan demanding that all vote-counting stop because his people weren’t giving proper access to voting sites and couldn’t oversee the counting process to ensure it was fair
Filing additional actions in Pennsylvania claiming the Senator there has given Biden back-door votes to try to push him out
Filing a lawsuit in Georgia, alleging that a GOP poll observer witnessed 53 late absentee ballots added to a pile in Chatham County
They have already demanded a Wisconsin recount and have filed a lawsuit in Michigan asking that the vote counting be halted because they think it is suspicious.
‘The President is well within the threshold to request a recount and we will immediately do so.
‘There have been reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results,’ Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement shortly after Wisconsin chief election official Meagan Wolfe announced the state went for Biden.
‘As votes in Michigan continue to be counted, the presidential race in the state remains extremely tight as we always knew it would be. President Trump’s campaign has not been provided with meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process, as guaranteed by Michigan law.
‘We have filed suit today in the Michigan Court of Claims to halt counting until meaningful access has been granted. We also demand to review those ballots which were opened and counted while we did not have meaningful access.
‘President Trump is committed to ensuring that all legal votes are counted in Michigan and everywhere else,’ Stepien said.
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Officials in northern Michigan’s Antrim County are investigating possible inaccurate results after the traditionally red county flipped to Joe Biden, the Detroit Free Press reports.
In 2016, Trump won Antrim – which has 23,000 residents – with 62% of the vote, taking 8,469 votes to Hillary Clinton’s 4,448.
But officials, who did not check the unofficial results before posting them, were stunned when it appeared Joe Biden had gained 7,700 votes and was leading Trump by 3,000 votes Wednesday morning.
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, said results on electronic tapes and a computer card appeared to be accurate. But she said they had become scrambled being transported in sealed bags from township precincts to county offices.
Officials are going over the tape of all the results and inputting the numbers manually.
Triston Cole, a Republican who represents Antrim County in the Michigan State House, told Interlochen Public Radio: ‘There is no way that we flipped from 62 percent Trump in 2016 to upside-down this time around’.
In a tweet earlier on Wednesday, the President cried fraud and claimed his overnight majority had ‘magically disappeared’ thanks to ‘surprise ballot dumps’ in Democrat states.
It is due to a large number of mail-in ballots for Biden being counted after votes for Trump which have predominantly been in person. Neither the President nor Joe Biden has yet reached the 270 electoral college votes they need to claim the White House and ballot counting will continue throughout the day and even the week.
Biden has officially won the most votes of any presidential candidate.
He is currently projected to have 72,054,459 votes, which is 50.4% of the total vote reported so far.
That beats Barack Obama, who, in 2008, won that record with 69,498,516 total votes, according to the Federal Election Commission.
If Biden follows his wins in Michigan and Wisconsin by taking Nevada, as expected, tomorrow – he will win the election with the key 270 electoral votes.
Then it won’t matter what happens in the Pennsylvania vote which was likely to be the subject of messy Trump legal challenges if he failed to win it when it finally finishes counting votes on Friday.
Daily Mail
