Biden leads 224 to 213 over Trump in the Electoral College vote count.
Wilmington / Washington:
The US presidential election was on hold on Wednesday, with a handful of states set to decide the outcome in the hours or days to come, even as Donald Trump falsely claimed victory and made unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud.
US President Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden still have possible paths to achieve the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, as states continue to count the mail-in ballots that have risen amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Shortly after Biden said he was confident he would win the contest once the votes were counted, Trump showed up at the White House in the early hours of the morning to declare his victory and said his lawyers would take his case to the Supreme Court of Canada. United States, without specifying what they would do. claim.
“We were about to win this election. Frankly, we won this election,” Trump said in an extraordinary attack on the electoral process by a sitting president. “This is a major fraud for our nation. We want the law to be used appropriately. So we will go to the United States Supreme Court. We want all votes to cease.” He did not provide any evidence to support his allegation of fraud.
Voting ended as planned on Tuesday evening, but many states regularly take days to complete ballot counting. A large number of people have voted by mail due to the coronavirus pandemic, making the tally longer than usual.
The “blue wall” trio say who unexpectedly sent Trump to the White House in 2016 – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – have stayed too close to call. Biden held a slight lead in Nevada, where officials said they wouldn’t resume the count until Thursday.
Two southern states, Georgia and North Carolina, were also still in play; Trump held the lead in both. A win for Biden in either would dramatically reduce Trump’s chances.
Biden’s victory in Arizona – Fox News and Associated Press predicted he would win the state – gave him multiple routes to the White House.
If he clings to Nevada, he could secure the presidency by winning the midwestern states of Wisconsin and Michigan, where he held big heads in the polls leading up to election day, even if he loses Pennsylvania.
Trump’s most likely path is through Pennsylvania; if he wins that state, he will get re-election if he also keeps the southern states and wins at least one midwestern state.
Biden leads 224 to 213 over Trump in the Electoral College vote count, according to Edison Research.
‘SCANDALOUS’
Biden’s hopes for a decisive early victory were dashed Tuesday night when Trump won the battlefields of Florida, Ohio and Texas. But the former vice president, 77, said he was confident he could win by winning all three key Rust Belt states.
“We feel good where we are,” Biden said in his home state of Delaware, shouting over a din of supporters in cars honking their horns in approval. “We believe that we are on the right track to win this election.”
In the final days of the campaign, Trump had suggested that he would claim victory if he was ahead on election night and seek to stop the counting of additional ballots.
“The president’s statement tonight on the attempt to end the counting of duly cast ballots was scandalous, unprecedented and incorrect,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.
Global stocks turned early in trade as results poured in, with a final call now unlikely for days and the result increasing the potential for lock-in complicating the possibility of a rapid increase in U.S. government spending to counter the effects. of the pandemic.
‘THIS IS THE PLACE OF ELECTORS’
“We are BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the election. We will never let them do that. Votes cannot be cast after the polls close!” Trump, 74, tweeted ahead of his White House appearance. Twitter was quick to flag the tweet as potentially misleading.]
“It’s not for me or Donald Trump to declare the winner of this election. It’s the voters’ place,” Biden said on Twitter in response to the president.
It was not clear what Trump meant when he said he would ask the Supreme Court to stop the “voting”. However, legal experts have said the election result could get bogged down in state-to-state litigation over a host of issues, including whether states can include late ballots mailed out on election day.
Even before Tuesday, the 2020 campaign saw a historic number of lawsuits in dozens of states, as the coronavirus pandemic forced election officials to prepare for an election like no other. Both campaigns brought together teams of lawyers to deal with any disputes.
Ahead of the election, Trump had said he wanted his latest US Supreme Court appointment, Amy Coney Barrett, to be upheld by the Senate in case the court had to hear an election dispute. Democrats had criticized the president for appearing to suggest he expected Barrett to speak out in his favor.
Trump has repeatedly said without evidence that widespread mail-in voting will lead to fraud, although U.S. election experts say fraud is extremely rare.
In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said the state still had more than a million mail-in ballots and called Trump’s remarks a partisan attack. According to Edison Research, more than 2.4 million early votes were cast in the state, including 1.6 million by registered Democrats and about 555,000 by Republicans.
The next president will lead a nation struck by a pandemic that has killed more than 231,000 people and left millions more jobless, along with racial tensions and political polarization that have only worsened over the course of a decade. vitriolic campaign.
The election will also decide which party will control the US Congress for the next two years, and the Democratic drive to take control of the Senate appeared to have failed. Democrats only won one seat held by Republicans while six other races remained undecided – Alaska, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina and two in Georgia.
LATINO PROBLEM FOR BIDEN
Trump’s strong performance in Florida, a go-to state for re-election, was fueled by his improved numbers with Latinos.
For months, Latin American Democratic activists complained that Biden ignored Hispanic voters and instead paid attention to black voters in major cities in the Midwest. Opinion polls in key states showed Biden underperformed with Latinos in the weeks leading up to the election.
Edison’s national exit poll showed that while Biden led Trump among non-white voters, Trump received a slightly higher proportion of non-white votes than in 2016. The poll showed that about 11% of Afro- Americans, 31% of Hispanics and 30% of Asians Americans voted for Trump, up 3 percentage points from 2016 in all three groups.
Biden placed Trump’s handling of the pandemic at the center of his campaign and had held a steady lead in national opinion polls on the Republican president.
Trump’s chaotic four years in office have been marked by the coronavirus crisis, an economy battered by pandemic shutdowns, impeachment drama, investigations into Russian election interference, racial tensions and controversial immigration policies.
Biden is making his third attempt to win the presidency after a five-decade political career, including eight years as vice president under Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.
(This story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
