CNN: Joe Biden is the next president of the United States

After days of waiting, CNN delivered it: Joe Biden won the election as the 46th president of the United States.

The electoral drama should come to an end: CNN declared Joe Biden the winner of the presidential election on Saturday afternoon (CET).
For days it was not clear who would be the president of the White House. Everything indicated that Democratic challenger Joe Biden, 77, won. However, mathematically it was still possible for a long time that Donald Trump (74) could remain in office for four more years.

Waiting increasingly became a test of patience, for the US with its nearly 330 million people, but also for the rest of the world. On Saturday, the focus was primarily on the decisive states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada. Everywhere, Biden was now ahead of Trump, although the incumbent president had partly led at first. The leadership of former Vice President Barack Obama on Saturday afternoon (3:00 pm CET) did not exceed 30,000 votes. Since Friday, the latest votes have only been coming in installments of a few hundred.

It’s not just Americans hoping for a dam break that could lead the voting computers of wary TV stations and the AP news agency to declare the race decided. Instead, analysts from CNN, Fox or NBC kept writing on their giant screens with the map of the USA and showed where the pending votes were still. Districts like Allegheny, Clayton, or Clark counties, which very few had heard of outside of the United States, receive enormous attention.

The recount was prolonged in this year’s US elections due to high turnout and the crown pandemic. Many states had adjusted their rules for voting by mail, among other things, so as not to expose voters to the risk of infection at the elections office. Millions of Americans used it.

Poll workers had to hide

The mood in the country is tense. A poll worker in the state of Georgia felt this. It received numerous threats after internet users misinterpreted a video that had been shared many times and threw a ballot. He just threw out a list of instructions that voters typically put in the envelope, Fulton County Elections Official Richard Barron said Friday night (local time). “Now he has gone into hiding because he was threatened. I find it embarrassing,” Barron said. He criticized that all the personal information of the assistant had been published on the Internet.

Biden: “Will clearly win races”

Before his likely victory in the US elections, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden called for American unity. “We can be opponents, but not enemies,” stressed Biden, while the last votes were counted after the presidential election. It’s time to put your anger aside and heal together as a nation. Biden is ahead in important states and on his way to victory.

Biden showed little doubt about his victory during his appearance Saturday night. “We will win this race by a clear majority and the nation is behind us,” he said in his hometown of Wilmington.

The speech was originally announced that afternoon by Biden’s campaign team for America’s main evening show; Due to the still tight races, it was ultimately not a winner speech. Biden announced that he would return to perform on Saturday.

Biden announces Corona aid

This is also shown by current figures for the states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, where it is leading. At the same time, Biden stressed that he would not yet declare himself the winner. The incumbent Donald Trump had already claimed victory and claimed without evidence that Democrats were trying to steal the presidency from him by fraud.

Biden said at the same time that he and vice-candidate Kamala Harris had already started working on measures against the corona pandemic, among other things. Americans who have already died can no longer be helped, but “we can save many lives in the future,” the 77-year-old said. Biden accuses Trump of having failed in the Corona crisis and thus unnecessarily causing the deaths of many Americans. The number of new infections every day rose to record levels of more than 120,000 this week.

Trump: “Maybe the leadership will return”

The incumbent lamented in a tweet on Friday night that he had had “great leadership” in all the disputed states in the presidential elections, which later “miraculously disappeared.” “Perhaps this leadership will return when we move forward with our legal process,” Trump said.

Trump poses as the victim of systematic election fraud without providing any evidence to support his claims. He reiterated the allegations Saturday on Twitter. The president announced that he would defend himself against defeat with a series of trials up to the Supreme Court. Trump’s team general manager Matt Morgan said Friday: “This election is not over.” Now there are criticisms of Trump’s behavior after the elections in Trump’s party. Several prominent Republicans urged obedience to democratic rules. Others, however, sided with the president.

There is no concrete evidence of massive electoral fraud. Election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) concluded that they had “found no evidence of systemic problems.”

Waiting for Pennsylvania

Counting of Tuesday’s election results continued. With the current state of the race, Biden would only have to win the state of Pennsylvania with his 20 voters to secure the majority of the 270 voters needed for victory. The president is not elected directly in the US, but by an electoral assembly (Electoral College) in December. The inauguration will take place on January 20, 2021.

After the contests that have already been decided in most states of the United States, the former vice president of the Government of Barack Obama already has at least 253 votes. It was also ahead in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. On the contrary, things were looking good for Trump in North Carolina and Alaska, which, however, would not be enough for him.

Biden in Pennsylvania led by 29,000 votes

About 100,000 votes were still ahead of the tally in Pennsylvania, but Biden had steadily improved his position in recent updates. By Saturday afternoon (CET), his lead had increased to 28,833 votes.

However, a conflict arose over the exclusion of certain votes. The Supreme Judge of the United States, Samuel Alito, ordered the Pennsylvania authorities to separately count and store postal votes received after Election Day. Election official Kathy Boockvar said, however, that there were few of those votes and they should not rotate the result: State authorities had already handled these votes separately in anticipation of legal disputes.

Biden’s leadership in Georgia also grows

In Georgia, Biden continued to distance himself from Trump. A new tentative result on Saturday afternoon (CET) showed Biden with 7248 votes in the lead. Previously, the lead had only been around 4,500 votes. If this trend is confirmed, Trump’s chances of winning Georgia’s recount due to the adjusted result would drop dramatically. Experts noted that 99 percent of the votes had already been counted and those that still remained to be counted would be in democratic strongholds around the Atlanta metropolis. There are also some voices of military personnel stationed abroad.

The only bright spot for the starter was western Arizona, where Biden’s lead narrowed to 29.861. There were still 170,000 votes to be counted, most of which should be processed on Saturday. The AP news agency and Fox News station had already attacked Arizona on election night. Biden, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs discouraged hopes for a quick result Friday night. The count will continue “through the weekend,” Hobbs said.

In Nevada, Biden nearly doubled his lead to 22,000 votes on Friday. Here, election commentators did not assume that outstanding votes would change anything in this majority, because they mainly come from the democratically strong Las Vegas. Fox News put Biden’s chances of winning in the state at 93 percent.

(WHAT / dpa / epos / twi)