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WASHINGTON – Exciting US elections were about to finally produce a winner on Thursday, and Democrat Joe Biden declared “without a doubt” that he would defeat President Donald Trump and all eyes on the decisive state of Pennsylvania.
Two days after the most tense election in decades, the meticulous vote-counting process, complicated this year by an avalanche of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus crisis, has reached the end of the game.
The 77-year-old Biden was just one or, at most, two states on the battlefield from getting a majority to take the White House. Trump, 74, needed an increasingly unlikely combination of victories in various states to stay in power.
In comments to reporters in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said “we continue to feel great.”
“We have no doubt that when the recount is over, Senator (Kamala) Harris and I will be declared the winners,” Biden said.
Trump, who shocked the world when he won the presidency in 2016 in his first bid for public office, repeatedly lashed out in written statements, alleging fraud and demanding that the counting of votes be stopped, and will later issue a statement at the White House. Thursday.
“IF YOU COUNT THE LEGAL VOTES, I EASILY WIN THE ELECTION!” he stated in a statement sent by his campaign, without accompanying evidence. “IF YOU COUNT THE ILLEGAL AND LATE VOTES, THEY MAY STEAL THE ELECTION FROM US!”
Biden, who has vowed to heal a country battered by Trump’s four extraordinarily polarizing years in power, called for “the people to remain calm.”
“The process is working,” he said in Wilmington. “The count is being completed. And we’ll find out soon. “
All about Pennsylvania?
In Georgia, a generally Republican state, Trump had a very thin and dwindling lead of less than 10,000. With 98 percent of the ballots already counted, the president and Biden were heading for a photographic finale.
In Arizona and Nevada, Biden kept few leads. If Biden wins both states, he would also win the presidency.
But the biggest piece of the puzzle was Pennsylvania, where Trump’s head start was again steadily depleted as election officials focused on processing mail-in ballots, which are typically cast by Biden supporters.
The Democratic candidate currently has 253 of the 538 electoral college votes distributed among the 50 states of the country. It has 264 with the inclusion of Arizona, which Fox News and the Associated Press have called in its favor, but other major organizations have not.
If Biden took Pennsylvania, he would get 20 more votes from the electoral college, instantly surpassing the 270 needed for overall victory.
With just over 325,000 outstanding ballots, Pennsylvania Supervisor of Elections Kathy Boockvar told the evening press that she could not give an estimate for a full count.
“It’s very close in Pennsylvania, right?” Boockvar said. “That means it will take longer to see who the winner is.”
The latest results showed that Trump’s lead in the state had shrunk to around 90,000 votes.
Trump lashes out
The Trump campaign continued to insist that the president has a way of winning, citing pockets of Republican support that have yet to be counted in such close races.
But Trump’s overwhelming focus was claiming, without evidence, that he was the victim of massive fraud.
Trump prematurely declared victory on Wednesday and threatened to request the Supreme Court to intervene to stop the vote counting, but he has nonetheless continued.
Since then, his team has been deployed across the battlefield states challenging the results in court and organizing a series of press conferences where supporters filed complaints of wrongdoing.
“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted Thursday, referring to his claim that mail-in ballots in particular are fraudulent.
But while Trump demanded that the count be stopped in Georgia and Pennsylvania, where he leads, his supporters and his campaign insisted that he continue in Arizona and Nevada, where he lags behind.
The campaign has announced lawsuits in Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania and Michigan, where it has already been thrown out, as well as demanding a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden won by just 20,000 votes.
Bob Bauer, a lawyer for Biden’s campaign, dismissed the large number of lawsuits as “without merit.”
“All of this is meant to create a big cloud,” Bauer said. “But it is not a very thick cloud. We see through it. So do the courts and electoral officials. “
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