Election in the United States: Joe Biden reached 264 electoral votes against 214 so far for Donald Trump. (Archive)
Washington:
American Democrat Joe Biden took a big step Wednesday to capture the White House, with victories in Michigan and Wisconsin that brought him closer to the majority, but President Donald Trump responded with a tirade alleging massive fraud and demanding that the count be stopped. votes.
In a short speech on national television, flanked by American flags and his election to Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden said he was not yet declaring victory, but said “when the count is up, we believe we will be the winners.”
By shifting the battlefields of northern Michigan and Wisconsin, Biden reached 264 electoral votes to Trump’s 214 so far. Adding the six from Nevada, where he is far ahead, would hit the magic number of 270 needed to win the White House.
In stark contrast to Trump’s increasingly heated rhetoric about being duped, Biden sought to project calm, reaching a nation torn by four years of polarizing leadership and traumatized by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I know how deep and harsh are the opposing views in our country on so many things,” said Biden, 77.
“But I also know this: to progress we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies. What unites us as Americans is much stronger than anything that can separate us.”
US presidential elections are not decided by popular vote, but by ensuring a majority in the state-by-state Electoral College, which has 538 members.
American media organizations called Michigan for Biden after he took a nearly 70,000 lead with 97 percent of the vote counted. Previously, Biden claimed Wisconsin, with a narrower but insurmountable lead.
This, along with Arizona, another Trump state that Biden changed, put the Democrat within arm’s reach to make Trump a one-term president.
Results were still being tabulated in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, all close contests, as well as trusty Republican Alaska. Counting has been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic and a record number of ballots sent by mail that may take longer to process.
Trump claims to have been misled
However, the 74-year-old Trump unilaterally claimed victory and made it clear that he would not accept the reported results, issuing unprecedented complaints, unsupported by any evidence, of fraud.
“Last night he was leading, often solidly, in many key states, in almost every case controlled and controlled by the Democrats,” Trump tweeted. “Then one by one, they began to magically disappear as the surprise dumps were counted.”
The Trump campaign announced a lawsuit to try to suspend vote counting in Michigan, where it said his team was denied proper access to observe the vote count.
Donald Trump unilaterally claimed victory and made it clear that he would not accept the reported results.
The campaign said it was also suing to halt vote counting in Pennsylvania, after the president overnight asked the Supreme Court to intervene to bar mail ballot processing after polls closed.
And he demanded a recount in Wisconsin, citing “wrongdoing.”
The president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, spoke to the media in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, accusing Democrats of sending fraudulent ballots. It also did not provide evidence.
“This is the way they intend to win,” Giuliani said. “We are not going to let them get away with it.”
Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said they had won in Pennsylvania, even though the result was still being calculated, and rejected the call that gave Biden a victory in Arizona.
Campaign adviser Jason Miller told reporters that by the end of the week, Trump’s re-election “will be clear to the entire nation.”
“We have to be patient”
Unless a candidate gets enough states for a total victory earlier, the fight could end in Pennsylvania, which will likely see the counting process more complicated.
Here, Trump had a roughly 500,000 vote lead with an estimated 78 percent of the vote counted, but votes were expected from strongly Democratic parts of the state, promising to level things out.
“We have to be patient,” Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said. “We may not know the results today.
“There are millions of vote-by-mail ballots,” he said. “They will be counted accurately and will be counted in their entirety.”
The Democratic governor ignored criticism from the White House for the slow vote count, saying that “our democracy is being tested in these elections.”
“Pennsylvania will have a fair election,” he said. “And that choice will be free from outside influences.”
The tight race for the White House and the recriminations evoked memories of the 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.
That contest, which depended on a handful of votes in Florida, eventually ended in the Supreme Court, which stopped a recount while Bush led the way.
The US Elections Project estimated total turnout at a record 160 million voters, including more than 101.1 million early voters, 65.2 million of whom voted by mail.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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