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(Reuters) – President-elect Joe Biden consolidated his electoral victory by capturing the battlefield state of Arizona late Thursday, but the transition to his administration remains in political stasis as President Donald Trump refuses to accept defeat.
Biden was projected to win Arizona after more than a week of vote counting, Edison Research said. He becomes the second Democratic presidential candidate in seven decades to win traditionally Republican status.
Biden’s victory in Arizona gives the Democrat 290 electoral votes in the state-by-state Electoral College determining the winner, more than the 270 needed to claim victory. Biden is also winning the popular vote by more than 5.3 million votes, or 3.4 percentage points.
With only a few states still counting votes, the electoral math is daunting for Trump, who has claimed without evidence that the election was marred by widespread fraud.
To erase Biden’s advantage, Trump, a Republican, would have to overcome the Democrat’s leadership in at least three of the competitive changing states.
The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits challenging vote counting in numerous states, although some have already been dismissed by justices. Legal experts have said the litigation has little chance of altering the outcome, and state election officials have said they see no evidence of serious wrongdoing or fraud.
Trump’s refusal to accept the result of the November 3 election has stalled the process of transition to a new administration. The federal agency that would normally provide funding to an incoming president-elect, the General Services Administration, has yet to recognize Biden as the winner.
His pick for White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told MSNBC on Thursday that receiving transition funding is important given that the US government will launch a coronavirus vaccination campaign early next year. .
“The sooner we can bring our transition experts together with people who are planning a vaccination campaign, the smoother the transition to a Biden presidency from a Trump presidency will be,” Klain said.
Biden was scheduled to meet with transition advisers again on Friday as he charts his approach to the pandemic and prepares to appoint his top appointees, including members of the cabinet.
REPORTS FOR BIDEN
Most Republicans have publicly endorsed Trump’s right to file lawsuits and have refused to acknowledge Biden as the winner. But more signs of dissent began to emerge on Thursday.
Party figures like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, and Karl Rove, one of former President George W. Bush’s top advisers, said that Biden should be treated as president-elect.
Meanwhile, several Republican senators said the Trump administration should allow Biden to receive classified intelligence reports, although they fell short of explicitly calling him the winner.
The incoming commander-in-chief is usually instructed to ensure that national security is not compromised during the transition.
“I don’t see it as a high-stakes proposal. I just think it’s part of the transition. And, if he does indeed win in the end, I think they should be able to get going,” the Senator said. John Cornyn told reporters.
The top House Republican, Kevin McCarthy, opposed the idea, suggesting that Trump could still prevail.
“He’s not president right now,” McCarthy said of Biden. “I don’t know if he will be president on January 20.”
Democrats have attacked Trump, and the Republicans who have covered him, for undermining the country’s institutions. In an interview to air Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes”, former President Barack Obama said Republicans were walking a “dangerous path” by backing Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
Biden has taken a measured approach, saying this week that he sees Trump’s claims as “embarrassing” but insisting he is not concerned about the impact on his transition to the White House. His legal advisers have dismissed Trump’s demands as political theater.
Top Congressional Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, on Thursday called on Republicans to accept Biden’s victory and work on a package. to help address the effects of the pandemic, which has killed more than 241,000 in the United States. State.
Several states and cities have begun to implement new restrictions on public activity in the face of a huge resurgence of cases nationwide.
(Information from Joseph Ax in Princeton, NJ; edited by Ross Colvin and Lincoln Feast)
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