Live US Election updates: Biden edges closer to win as Trump mounts legal challenges
Democrat Joe Biden is edging closer to victory over President Donald Trump in the US presidential race as election officials tallied votes in the handful of states that will determine the outcome.
The Republican president, who during the long and rancourous campaign attacked the integrity of the American voting system, has alleged fraud without providing evidence, filed lawsuits and called for at least one recount.
Some legal experts called the challenges a long shot unlikely to affect the eventual outcome of the election.
As counting continued two days after Election Day, slowed by large numbers of mail-in ballots this year, Biden was leading in Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona and closing in on Trump in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Multiple Trump lawsuits and a recount request would have to succeed and find in some cases tens of thousands of invalid ballots to reverse the result if Biden does prevail.
Some of the outstanding votes in Georgia and Pennsylvania were clustered in places expected to lean Democratic – like the Atlanta and Philadelphia areas.
In Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, officials said they expected to finish vote tallying on Thursday morning, with 10,000 absentee ballots left to count. By early Thursday, Trump led by 19,000 votes out of nearly 5 million cast in the state.
Trump had to win the states where he was still ahead, including North Carolina, plus either Arizona or Nevada to triumph and avoid becoming the first incumbent US president to lose a re-election bid since fellow Republican George HW Bush in 1992.
The president appears to have grown more upset as his leads in some states have diminished or evaporated during the counting. On Thursday morning, he weighed in on Twitter, writing, “STOP THE COUNT!”
To capture the White House, a candidate must amass at least 270 votes in the state-by-state Electoral College. Such electoral votes are based largely on a state’s population. Edison Research gave Biden a 243 to 213 lead in Electoral College votes. Other networks said Biden had won Wisconsin, which would give him another 10 votes.
The counting and court challenges set the stage for days if not weeks of uncertainty before 8 December, the deadline to resolve election disputes. The president is sworn into office on 20 January, 2021.
“The litigation looks more like an effort to allow Trump to continue rhetorically attempting to delegitimatize an electoral loss,” said Joshua Geltzer, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.
– Reuters
