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WASHINGTON / DETROIT (Reuters) – The battleground of the U.S. presidential election, the battleground state of Georgia, was expected to confirm Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump on Thursday after a meticulous recount as the US re-election campaign Trump said he was withdrawing a lawsuit in Michigan.
The official in charge of implementing Georgia’s voting systems, Gabriel Sterling, told Fox News that the state’s audit and recount were almost complete and on track to verify Biden’s advantage. He called the allegations of wrongdoing in voters “savage mischaracterizations.”
“The good thing was: the audit did its job” by finding some small batches of uncounted votes that were being counted that morning, he said. “The count is going very well.”
In the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the winner of the election, Biden, a Democrat, has garnered 306 electoral votes to Republican Trump’s 232, well ahead of the 270 needed for victory. The winner in each state receives the electoral votes of that state, a number roughly proportional to the population.
The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in several states with little success so far. Those legal motions, peppered with factual errors, have been dismissed by the Biden campaign as “theatrical.”
Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said Thursday the campaign was withdrawing its lawsuit challenging the results of the vote in Michigan, where this week Biden was certified as the winner in a series of tangled events.
Two Republican members of the Wayne County canvass board initially voted Tuesday to block the certification of the vote before reversing their decision after angry backlash from the public.
But both signed affidavits on Wednesday to cancel their confirmation of Biden’s victory, saying they had changed positions under pressure. A spokesman for the Michigan secretary of state’s office said the post-event statement did not prevent the ballots from being certified.
One of the two, Monica Palmer, confirmed by text message to Reuters on Thursday that Trump had called her to register after the vote was certified.
Trump has fewer and fewer options to overturn the results of an election in which Biden won an additional 5.8 million votes across the country. Biden is due to be sworn in on January 20.
Critics say Trump’s refusal to compromise has serious implications for national security and the fight against the coronavirus, which has killed more than 250,000 Americans.
Among other concerns, the administration has withheld funding and security clearances for Biden’s staff to ease the presidential transition.
‘A DEEPER PROBLEM’
In Pennsylvania, where Biden won by 82,000 votes, the Trump campaign asks a judge to declare him the winner there, saying his Republican-controlled legislature should elect all 20 voters from the state’s Electoral College.
In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign has paid or a partial recount, though election officials there say it will likely only add to Biden’s 20,000-vote lead in a state that has 10 electoral votes.
Several prominent law firms have pulled out of the Trump campaign legal operation, leaving Trump’s personal attorney Giuliani to spearhead the efforts.
Trump said on Twitter Thursday that the lawyers would discuss a “viable path to victory” at a press conference at noon ET (1700 GMT).
State and federal election officials, as well as outside experts, say that Trump’s argument that the election was stolen from him by widespread election fraud has no basis in fact.
However, it appears to be affecting the public’s trust in American democracy. A Reuters / Ipsos opinion poll released Wednesday found that roughly half of Republicans believe Trump “rightfully won” the election.
Arizona’s top election official, Democrat Katie Hobbs, said she and her family had received violent threats and urged Trump to stop questioning the result, in which she lost by just over 10,000 votes.
“(The threats) are a symptom of a deeper problem in our state and country: the constant and systematic undermining of trust between us and our democratic process,” Hobbs said in a statement.
Trump, who has largely remained in the White House and kept out of public view since the election, has no public events scheduled for Thursday.
(Reporting by Andy Sullivan, Susan Heavey, and Doina Chiacu in Washington, additional reporting by Michael Martina in Detroit; written by Daniel Trotta and Sonya Hepinstall; edited by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)
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