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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrat Joe Biden moved closer to victory over Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency on Thursday when election officials counted the votes in the handful of states that will decide the outcome and the Republican president pursued a strategy of litigation.
Trump, who during the long and spiteful campaign attacked the integrity of the US voting system, has alleged election fraud without providing evidence, filed lawsuits and called for at least a state recount.
The latest move in his campaign was a lawsuit expected to be announced later Thursday alleging voter fraud in Nevada, one of the pivotal states where he is far behind Biden.
Some legal experts called the challenges a long shot that will likely not affect the final outcome of the election.
As the count continued two days after Election Day, slowed by a slew of mail-in ballots amid the coronavirus pandemic, Biden was leading in Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona and closing in on Trump in Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Multiple Trump lawsuits and a recount request would have to be successful and, in some cases, find tens of thousands of invalid ballots to reverse the outcome if Biden prevails.
Some of the outstanding votes in Georgia and Pennsylvania were clustered in places that were expected to lean Democratic, such as the Atlanta and Philadelphia areas.
In Fulton County in Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, officials said they expected to finish counting the vote Thursday morning, with 10,000 missing ballots to be counted. As of early Thursday, Trump was leading with 19,000 votes out of nearly 5 million cast statewide.
Trump has to win the states in which he is still ahead, including North Carolina, as well as Arizona or Nevada to succeed and avoid becoming the first sitting US president to lose a re-election bid since his fellow Republican George HW Bush. in 1992.
The president seems to have gotten angrier that his advantages in some states have diminished or evaporated during the count. On Thursday morning, he took in on Twitter and wrote: “STOP THE COUNT!”
Although he has no authority to scrutinize the ballots, Trump later added: “ANY VOTE GIVEN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”
Some states count ballots if they were postmarked on Election Day, but they arrive on later days.
To conquer the White House, a candidate must accumulate at least 270 votes in the Electoral College state by state. These electoral votes are based primarily on the population of a state. Edison Research gave Biden a 243-213 lead in Electoral College votes. Other media outlets said Biden had won Wisconsin, which would give him another 10 votes.
The extremely close election has underscored the political polarization in the United States and the deep divisions along racial, socioeconomic, religious and generational lines, as well as between urban and rural areas.
The recounts and court challenges set the stage for days, if not weeks, of uncertainty before December 8, the deadline for resolving electoral disputes. The president takes office on January 20, 2021.
“The litigation looks more like an effort to allow Trump to continue to rhetorically attempt to delegitimize an electoral loss,” said Joshua Geltzer, executive director of the Georgetown Law Institute for Constitutional Defense and Protection.
Some fellow Republicans have voiced displeasure at Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
“The problem with filing unsubstantiated charges is that it undermines faith in democracy,” Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Michigan who was reelected Tuesday, told CNN.
THIN MARGINS
Biden, a 77-year-old former vice president and US senator who has spent half a century in public life, predicted victory Wednesday and launched a website to begin the transition to a Democrat-controlled White House.
Trump, 74, is seeking a second four-year term after a tumultuous first term in which he was indicted but acquitted in a Senate trial, strained relations with NATO allies, and fought to respond to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed an estimated 230,000 Americans.
The Trump campaign called for a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden led with roughly 21,000 votes out of 3.3 million cast, a margin thin enough to qualify for a recount. However, election experts said a recount in Wisconsin was unlikely to alter the outcome.
His campaign also filed lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop the vote counting. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, in charge of the election, called the Trump team’s lawsuit “frivolous.”
The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Georgia to demand that Chatham County, which includes the city of Savannah, segregate and secure late-arriving ballots to ensure they are not counted.
He also asked the United States Supreme Court to allow Trump to join a pending lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania Republicans over whether the battlefield state should be allowed to accept late-arriving ballots that were sent by. mail before Election Day.
The Trump campaign said it planned to make a statement in Las Vegas later Thursday. A source said the campaign would announce a lawsuit alleging that thousands of people voted that they no longer live in the state.
Despite Trump’s fraud allegations and a baseless accusation that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election, US election experts say voting fraud is rare.
With tensions rising, about 200 of Trump’s supporters, some armed with rifles and pistols, gathered outside an election office in Phoenix, Ariz., Wednesday after unsubstantiated rumors that votes were not being counted.
In Detroit, officials blocked about 30 people, mostly Republicans, from entering a vote counting center amid unsubstantiated claims that the vote count in Michigan was fraudulent.
Anti-Trump protesters in other cities demanded that vote counting continue and there were arrests in Portland, Oregon, as well as New York, Denver and Minneapolis. More than 100 events are planned across the country between Wednesday and Saturday.
By early Thursday, Biden had garnered about 3.6 million more votes than Trump nationwide. Trump defeated Democrat Clinton in 2016 after winning crucial states on the battlefield and securing the Electoral College victory despite winning about 3 million more votes across the country.
(Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Susan Heavey, and Doina Chiacu in Washington, Mimi Dwyer in Phoenix, Tim Reid in Los Angeles, Tom Hals in Delaware, and Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; written by Will Dunham and Andy Sullivan; edited by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)
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