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Joe Biden started Thursday with a lead against Donald Trump that tantalizingly brought the Democratic challenger closer to the presidency, as votes continued to be counted in the key states of Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
Donald Trump was still clinging to the tracks in Pennsylvania and Georgia, but Biden was narrowing the gap in the two states as the backlog of postal ballots was counted. A victory in Pennsylvania alone, with his 20 electoral college votes, would be enough to make Biden president.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, Biden’s lead was gradually being eroded by Trump’s votes being counted late. The Associated Press (AP) and Fox News called the Democrat the winner in the state on election night, but as of Thursday morning no other major television network had followed suit and kept declaring that the race was too close to call. The Guardian, which uses AP election data, has called the race for Biden.
With Arizona included in his tally, Biden would only need six more electoral college votes to reach the 270 needed for victory, so a victory in any other state would suffice.
In Nevada on Thursday morning, Biden reinforced a very small lead to about 12,000 (about one percent of the votes), but there are still about 200,000 votes to count.
In the popular vote nationwide, Biden has so far a record 72.3 million, more than any other presidential candidate in American history, and about 3.5 million more than Trump.
The two candidates posted grieving tweets on Thursday morning. Biden posted a short video titled Count Every Vote, while Trump took to Twitter, after an unusual 14-hour silence, with a short message in capital letters: “Stop the count!”
That message was flagged as disputed and possibly misleading by Twitter, as a president does not have the authority to stop the vote count. It was also confusing, because in Arizona and Nevada, the Trump field would depend on belatedly counted votes to win. In these southwestern states, the campaign’s strategy has been to focus on alleged irregularities in the count so far, seeking to undermine faith in its integrity.
Raucous crowds of Trump supporters staged protests outside vote-counting centers in Phoenix, Arizona and Detroit, Michigan, angered by unfounded claims by Trump and some of his loyalists about widespread wrongdoing and insistence that the early leads of the vote would be reversed. president in the counts. it meant that the election was being “stolen.”
The Trump campaign called for a recount in Wisconsin and launched a series of lawsuits in four states with a series of technical challenges. In Michigan, which has already been summoned by Biden, the president’s attorneys lobbied with a lawsuit for the count to be suspended until a campaign representative can be at each postal counting table, and for a review of open and counted ballots. in the absence of your inspector.
In Nevada, the campaign filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging that some 10,000 voters who voted there were no longer residents. He has another pending lawsuit in Nevada that challenges the efficacy of signature matching software, a case the Trump camp has already lost twice.
In Pennsylvania, the president’s side is seeking to ask the supreme court to reverse its decision that allows the state to extend the period in which it accepts late ballots until Friday, as long as they are postmarked Tuesday. Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro said in an interview with CNN that the lawsuit was “more of a political document than a legal document.”
On Thursday, the count was stopped in Allegheny County, the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, until Friday, pending a legal challenge of more than 29,000 ballots that had been cast at the request of voters who said they had accidentally messed up their original ballots. Another 6000 ballots, which are too wrinkled to enter the ballot scanner, will need to be counted manually.
Biden’s camp has assembled its own legal teams in major electoral foci and launched a “fighting fund” to finance the effort.
Meanwhile, a coalition of liberal activist groups is suing the US Postal Service. swept sorting offices in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, pointing to data suggesting there were as many as 8,000 undelivered in Pennsylvania alone.
In the Senate race, Democrats clung to the feeble hope of wrestling control of the House from Republicans.
A race for a seat in Georgia turned into a second round, and the second seat was left in the balance Thursday morning with the Republican incumbent barely 50% turnout to avoid a second round, but the votes they are still being counted. Nor was a close race for the Senate called in North Carolina on Thursday morning.
