Tensions skyrocketed in Wednesday’s still-indecisive US election after President Donald Trump made unprecedented fraud allegations and demanded a recount in Wisconsin, where Democrat Joe Biden scored another victory to move closer to an overall victory.
While there was no official winner more than 12 hours after the last polls closed on Tuesday, the fate of the most divisive contest in decades came down to just a handful of states where the Republican incumbent and his rival were fighting on very narrow margins. .
In the latest blow to Trump, Biden, 77, was declared the winner of Wisconsin, with an insurmountable lead of 20,000 after 98 percent of the votes were counted.
This reflected Biden’s slow but steady march through the remaining states in the vast country, where the count was complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic and a record number of early and mailed votes.
Biden led Michigan by nearly 45,000 votes with 94 percent counted and has already been declared the winner of another close race in Arizona. Results were still being tabulated in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, all of them closed contests.
The apparent change of fortune towards the Democrat prompted the 74-year-old Trump to launch a tirade alleging massive fraud that he claimed on Twitter had caused his victories to “magically disappear.”
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.
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.
“In Pennsylvania, bad things are happening,” said deputy campaign manager Justin Clark in a statement. “Democrats are preparing to disenfranchise and dilute Republican votes. President Trump is fighting with his team to stop him,” he said.
And he demanded a recount in Wisconsin, citing “wrongdoing.”
Biden’s trust
Biden’s camp expressed their confidence, and campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon called the former vice president’s victory a “foregone conclusion.”
Biden himself was expected to make a statement about the razor’s edge race soon.
But Trump has made it clear that he will not accept defeat before having exhausted all possible challenges.
During the night after the polls closed on Tuesday, he went on live television from the White House to affirm that “we won this election” and allege that there had been “fraud against the American public.”
He later repeated his vague allegations of vote rigging on Twitter, despite the lack of substantiated reports of significant irregularities during voting or recount.
“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.”
‘We have to be patient’
The tightest and most disorderly count could unfold in Pennsylvania – the biggest prize is still pending.
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.
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