In a closely fought contest, Democrat Joe Biden moved closer to victory over Donald Trump for the US presidency even as Trump moved a court to stop vote count. Trump has, all through the election campaign, been questioning the integrity of the American voting system.
Biden needs a total of 270 votes to capture the Electoral College that determines the White House winner. The Democrat currently has 253 electoral votes—or 264 if the 11 electoral votes from the southwestern state of Arizona are included. Fox News and Associated Press projected Biden as the winner in Arizona on Tuesday night, but others are yet to turn the state blue.
Biden could pick up the votes needed for victory from other states where counting was continuing—Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. In Nevada, where 86 percent of the vote has been counted, the Democratic hopeful has a razor-thin 8,000-vote lead. Nevada, which was won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, has six electoral votes.
Trump has sizeable leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania but Biden has been making gains as the votes continue to be tallied and his campaign is confident he can overtake the President.
President Trump, in the meantime, said that the states where Biden is winning will be “legally challenged by us for voter fraud and state election fraud”. Taking to Twitter, he said, “All of the recent Biden claimed states will be legally challenged by us for voter fraud and state election fraud. Plenty of proof: just check out the media. We will win! America first!” Earlier in the day, he had said, “Stop the count!” In another tweet, he said, “Any vote that came in after election day will not be counted!”
Earlier, President Trump’s re-election campaign had filed a lawsuit to stop ballot counting in Michigan and Pennsylvania and to prevent the counting of absentee ballots in Georgia that it claims arrived after the deadline on Election Day.
The USA Today reported that the announcements of the Pennsylvania and Michigan lawsuits came shortly before Biden was projected on Wednesday afternoon to win Michigan. Trump launched multiple legal challenges on Wednesday, announcing lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania and demanding a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden won by just 20,000 votes.
Some legal experts called the challenges a long shot unlikely to affect the eventual outcome of the election. 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, reported Reuters.
The President seems 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!”
Although he has no authority over ballot counting, Trump later added, “Any vote that came in after Election Day will not be counted!” Some states count ballots if they were postmarked by Election Day but arrive in subsequent days.
The exceedingly close election has underscored the political polarisation in the United States and the deep divisions along racial, socioeconomic, religious and generational lines as well as between urban and rural areas.
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