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2020 U.S. elections
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Democratic candidate Joe Biden has been ahead of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, a key state in America’s presidential race, voting data shows.
If Biden takes the state, it would ensure his victory in the elections. The state has 20 votes in the electoral college.
According to the most recent data, Biden leads by more than 6,800 votes, with 98% counted.
Previously, Biden was ahead of his Republican rival in Georgia, another key state on the battlefield.
He leads there with more than 1,500 votes, with 99% of the votes counted. Georgia is a traditionally Republican state and has not been won by a Democrat in a presidential race since 1992.
Georgia’s secretary of state said Friday there would be a vote count there because the margin was too small.
If Biden wins Pennsylvania, the state where he was born, he would have 273 votes in the electoral college, enough to win.
Pennsylvania has always been an important political battleground. The state voted for Democrats in six consecutive races before switching to Trump in 2016.
The Republican president’s team insists that the election “is not over” and that legal challenges and recounts in some states will favor them.
Bob Bauer, a campaign attorney for Biden, said the lawsuits were legally “without merit” and designed “to send false messages about what is happening in the electoral process.”
A senior Trump administration official told CBS News that Trump did not plan to budge if Biden finally declared victory.
What is the current state of the race?
Joe Biden currently has 253 votes in the electoral college, while Trump has 214. To win the White House, a candidate needs 270.
Some news organizations have a higher tally for Biden, having projected a victory for the Democrat in Arizona. But the BBC believes that the state is too early to call.
Voting is also currently too close to call in Nevada and North Carolina.
A victory in Pennsylvania alone, or in two of the other four remaining states, would be enough to confirm Biden as president-elect, unless a legal challenge is filed.
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Meanwhile, Trump would need to win Pennsylvania and three of the four remaining states.
Here’s the last of the other three states still up for grabs:
- Trump has reduced the Democratic candidate’s lead in Arizona to about 47,000 votes. CBS News, a partner of the BBC, has classified the state, which has 11 votes in the electoral college, as a “likely” victory for Biden.
- Trump had an advantage of more than 76,000 in North Carolina (15 electoral votes) with 96% of the votes counted.
- In Nevada, Biden has an advantage of more than 11,000 over Trump. The state has six votes under the electoral college system. An election official said the results of more than 51,000 postal ballots would be updated on Friday.
What have the candidates said?
Trump has made unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
Speaking from the White House on Thursday, the president said: “If you count the legal votes, I win easily. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the elections from us.”
Beyond the allegations of wrongdoing, the Trump campaign has not produced any evidence.
The president added: “We were winning in all the key places, actually a lot, and then our numbers miraculously started to drop in secret.”
“There have been a lot of mischief and we cannot bear that in our country,” he said.
Trump actively discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, while Biden urged his voters to do so, and it is these postal ballots that are now being counted in key states.
Election analysts also say the president’s claims about Democratic electoral corruption are undermined by the better-than-expected performance of his fellow Republicans in congressional races across the map.
Several US networks cut off their broadcast of Trump’s speech, while numerous Republicans criticized the comments.
In a short televised speech, Biden called for calm across the country and again expressed confidence that he would be declared the winner.
“Democracy is sometimes complicated,” he said. “Sometimes it also takes a little patience.”
“The process is working. The count is being completed. And we will know very soon.”
As the results come in, protests involving both sides have been held in major cities over the vote count.
What legal action has the president taken?
Trump has filed a series of lawsuits alleging wrongdoing and a lack of transparency.
The president demanded a recount in Wisconsin, as is the right of any candidate who approaches 1% of his rival in total votes there.
But Biden was leading by 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, and election analysts say past counts in the state have generally only altered the final tally by a few hundred votes.
The Trump campaign lawsuits filed in Michigan and Georgia were dismissed by state courts on Thursday.
But in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign scored a legal victory when a state appeals court judge said Republican election observers should be allowed to take a closer look at ballot processing.
The Republican Party in Nevada said it had sent a report to the US Department of Justice on what it alleged were “at least 3,062 cases of voter fraud.” The party tweeted that thousands of people had been identified violating the law by casting their votes after moving out of state.
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford told the BBC this week that all the evidence showed the state had conducted a “free, safe and secure election.”
“We have security measures in place to prevent fraud, such as signature verification, unique barcodes and other tools,” he said.
