Joe Biden said he felt “really good” with Michigan and Wisconsin.
Washington:
Americans woke up Wednesday not knowing who would be the next president of the United States, as votes were still being counted in six key states that could tip the hard-contested election toward incumbent Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Joe Biden.
Fueling fears of a constitutional crisis, Trump prematurely declared victory overnight and threatened to demand Supreme Court intervention to halt the vote count, but continued nonetheless.
“We won this election,” the 74-year-old president told supporters in the East Room of the White House before final vote counts were completed. “This is a fraud on the American public.”
Biden’s campaign criticized Trump’s claim of victory as “scandalous, unprecedented and incorrect” and as a “naked effort to take away democratic rights from American citizens.”
“The counting will not stop. It will continue until each duly cast vote is counted,” he said. “If the president follows through on his threat to go to court to try to avoid the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams ready to be deployed to resist that effort.”
The result appeared to hinge on the results of six states where a winner has yet to be declared: Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
At 9:00 a.m. (1400 GMT), Biden had a small lead in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, while Trump was ahead in Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
But state election officials warned that with tens of thousands of ballots pending in some states, millions in others, careers could change.
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.
The Bush-Gore contest, which relied on a handful of votes in Florida, eventually ended in the Supreme Court, which stopped a recount while Bush was ahead.
A flood of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic has slowed the counting of votes in some states this year, several of which only began counting mail-in ballots on Tuesday.
Officials in Michigan, for example, said they expected to have all the votes counted by the end of the day, while in Pennsylvania officials said several more days could pass.
“If everything continues like this, we will have the full results in the next few days,” Al Schmidt, the commissioner for the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city, told CNN.
“But Pennsylvania allows votes to be received and counted until Friday and three days after the election.
“So we can’t count what we don’t have yet.”
Participation record
The US Elections Project estimated total turnout at a record 160 million voters, including more than 101.1 early voters, 65.2 million of whom voted by mail.
In an election that was projected in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 230,000 lives in the United States, Trump appeared to have avoided a Democratic wave predicted by some polls.
But it was not clear Wednesday morning which candidate would get the 270 votes needed for the Electoral College victory that determines the winner of the presidential race.
Trump took the White House podium after 2:00 am and declared that he would go to the Supreme Court because “we want the voting to stop.”
The vote had already ended when Trump began speaking and appeared to be asking the highest court in the country to stop the vote count.
Trump has criticized mail ballots for months, accusing without evidence that they could be fraudulent.
Biden had previously warned that the vote count would take a while as he greeted his own sponsors at a socially distanced rally in his home state of Delaware.
“We believe we are on our way to winning this election,” said the 77-year-old former vice president and senator from Delaware. “Keep the faith guys, we’re going to win this.”
Trump for the past four years has often been quick to say that he is being treated unfairly, but even some of his fellow Republicans expressed displeasure at his dramatic intervention.
“Stop. Period. The votes will be counted and you will win or lose. And the United States will accept that. Patience is a virtue,” tweeted Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman who won reelection.
“I don’t agree with what he did tonight,” said former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who helped Trump prepare for his first debate against Biden.
“There is simply no basis for making that argument tonight,” Christie told ABC News. “There just isn’t.”
‘Constitutional crisis’?
Foreign countries also raised the alarm, with German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer warning that Trump could create a “constitutional crisis.”
Biden is the first Democrat in 24 years to win Arizona, taking advantage of the southwestern state’s changing demographics and the popularity of astronaut Mark Kelly, who won a Republican-held Senate seat.
But no other state changed immediately and Trump won an award early in Florida, where his hard line against Latin American leftists helped him make his way among Cuban Americans.
Democratic hopes of changing Texas, an indispensable Republican stronghold for Trump, and Ohio.
Biden, as expected, comfortably won the biggest prize of all, California, as well as New York and easily took Minnesota and New Hampshire, two states where Hillary Clinton in 2016 had only achieved victories over Trump.
Again, attention turned to three states that elected Trump four years ago, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with ballots still waiting to be counted in the Democratic strongholds of Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee.
Biden said he felt “great” with Michigan and Wisconsin and expressed his confidence in Pennsylvania, where he was born.
Biden said it was also competitive in Georgia, a state that until recently didn’t seem to be in the game as poll workers in its largest city, Atlanta, stopped counting overnight after a pipe broke.
Experts had been warning for weeks that this year’s election results would take time, and they expressed fears that Trump would cause chaos or even violence by questioning the process.
While there were no immediate reports of riots, stores have been boarded up throughout the capital, Washington.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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