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By Reuters 
16h ago
By Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland
Wilmington, Delaware / Washington – Democrat Joe Biden held a narrow lead over President Donald Trump in Wisconsin after officials completed their vote count and advanced further in Michigan, even as the Republican incumbent’s campaign promised to seek a recount and a lawsuit to challenge results. in the two states of the Midwest battlefield.
Wisconsin and Michigan are central in the race for the 270 electoral votes in the Electoral College state by state needed to win the White House. Trump won both states in his 2016 election victory. Losing them would greatly damage his quest for another four years in office.
Trump, who made the attack on the integrity of the US elections a central campaign issue, in the early hours of the morning falsely claimed victory in the elections and made unsubstantiated accusations of electoral fraud. His campaign said Wednesday that he had filed a lawsuit to stop the count in Michigan, claiming he had not been allowed to observe the opening of the ballots.
Biden led by 38,000 votes out of more than 5 million ballots in Michigan.
“The Michigan elections were conducted in a transparent manner, with access provided for both political parties and the public, and using a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that all ballots are counted fairly and accurately,” Ryan Jarvi, press secretary for Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel, said in a statement.
Wisconsin officials finished their recount around noon after an all-night effort, showing Biden with a lead of just over 20,000 votes, or 0.6%, according to Edison Research. The Trump campaign immediately said it would request a recount, which is allowed by state law when the margin is less than 1%.
CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press all projected Biden as the winner in Wisconsin, although Edison Research, which provides voting data to the National Election Pool media consortium, has not announced a winner due to the pending recount.
Highly contested states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, were still counting votes, leaving the outcome of the national elections still in doubt.
THE PANDEMIC EFFECT
Voting concluded as scheduled Tuesday night, but many states typically take days to finish counting the ballots. There was an increase in vote-by-mail ballots nationwide amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump led in the two southern states, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as Pennsylvania. But if Trump loses Wisconsin and Michigan, he would have to win all three plus Arizona or Nevada, where Biden was leading in recent vote counts.
At the moment, excluding Wisconsin, Biden leads Trump from 227 to 213 in Electoral College votes, which are largely based on a state’s population.
Biden led Arizona, a battleground state with a high Latino population, making him the second Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in 72 years. Trump won the state in 2016.
In Pennsylvania, Trump led by about 389,000 votes as officials gradually worked their way through millions of mail-in ballots, which were seen as likely to benefit Biden. Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien called the president the winner in Pennsylvania even though state officials had not completed the count.
In a duel over conference calls with journalists on Wednesday morning, officials from each campaign insisted that their candidate would prevail.
“If we count all the legal votes, we win,” Stepien said, setting the stage for post-election litigation over the vote count.
Biden’s campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon told reporters that the former vice president was on track to win the election, while senior legal adviser Bob Bauer said there was no reason for Trump to invalidate the legally cast votes.
“We are going to defend this vote, the vote for which Joe Biden has been elected to the presidency,” Bauer said, adding that the campaign’s legal team was prepared for any challenge.
Biden was expected to deliver a speech later Wednesday. The campaign also launched a new group, the Biden Fight Fund, to raise money for legal struggles over the elections.
Trump continued to carry out unsubstantiated attacks on the vote-counting process on Twitter on Wednesday, hours after he appeared at the White House and declared victory in an election that was far from being decided. Both Facebook and Twitter flagged various posts by the president for promoting misleading claims.
“We were preparing to win this election. Frankly, we won this election,” Trump said before launching an extraordinary attack on the electoral process by a sitting president. “This is a huge fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used properly. So we will go to the Supreme Court of the United States. We want all voting to stop.”
Trump did not provide evidence to back up his fraud claim and did not explain how he would fight the results in Supreme Court.
In the popular nationwide vote, Biden on Wednesday was comfortably ahead of Trump, with about 3 million more votes. Trump won the 2016 election over Democrat Hillary Clinton after winning crucial states on the battlefield despite garnering about 3 million more votes across the country.
Election uncertainty only added to the anxiety many Americans felt after a virulent campaign that unfolded amid a pandemic that has killed more than 233,000 Americans and left millions more out of work. The country has also faced months of unrest related to protests over racism and police brutality.
Biden’s hopes of a decisive early victory were dashed Tuesday night when Trump won the battlefields of Florida, Ohio and Texas. Among other undecided states, Nevada does not expect to update its vote count until Thursday, state officials said.
TEAMS OF LAWYERS
It was not clear what Trump meant by saying overnight that he would ask the Supreme Court to stop the “vote.” The higher court does not hear direct challenges, but instead hears cases that have made their way from the lower courts.
Trump has repeatedly said, without evidence, that widespread voting by mail would lead to fraud, although US election experts say fraud is very rare.
Legal experts have said the election outcome could get bogged down in state-by-state litigation over a number of issues, including whether states can include late-arriving ballots that were mailed before Election Day. Both campaigns have assembled teams of attorneys in preparation for any dispute.
The Supreme Court previously allowed Pennsylvania to go ahead with a plan to count ballots mailed before Election Day that go up to three days later, but some conservative justices suggested they would be willing to reconsider the matter. State officials planned to segregate those ballots as a precaution.
The election will also decide which party will control the United States Congress for the next two years, and the Democratic push to gain control of the Senate did not appear to be enough. Democrats had reversed two seats held by the Republicans while losing one of their own, and five other races remained undecided: Alaska, Michigan, North Carolina and two in Georgia.
Trump’s strong performance in Florida, a state he must win for re-election, was fueled by his best numbers with Latinos.
Edison’s national exit poll showed that while Biden led Trump among non-white voters, Trump received a slightly higher proportion of non-white votes than in 2016. The poll showed that approximately 11% of African Americans, 31 % of Hispanics and 30% of Asians Americans voted for Trump, 3 percentage points more than in 2016 in all three groups.
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