WASHINGTON: For the first time Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden took the lead in the key state of Georgia which carries 16 votes in the electoral college.
Former vice president ate away at President Donald Trump’s initial lead in the southern state and is now ahead by 917 votes. Trump had won Georgia by five percentage points in 2016, media reported.
The world’s attention has been focused on the states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada, where extremely tight races between the two presidential candidates have prevented the declaration of anyone as a winner yet.
Likewise in Pennsylvania, a key state with 20 electoral college votes, Trump’s early lead has been whittled down to a mere 0.3 points margin over Biden with many votes yet to be counted.
With his re-election chances fading as more and more votes are counted in a handful of battleground states, Trump launched an extraordinary assault on the country’s democratic process from the White House on Thursday, falsely claiming the election was being “stolen” from him.
Offering no evidence, Trump lambasted election workers and alleged fraud in the states where results from a dwindling set of uncounted votes are pushing Democrat Joe Biden nearer to victory.
“This is a case where they’re trying to steal an election,” Trump said, who spoke for about 15 minutes in the White House briefing room before leaving without taking questions.
Biden, the former vice president, was steadily eating away the Republican incumbent’s leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia even as he maintained narrow advantages in Nevada and Arizona, moving closer to securing the 270 votes in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the winner.
Biden would become the next president by winning Pennsylvania, or by winning either of Georgia or Nevada. Trump’s likeliest path appeared narrower — he needed to hang onto Pennsylvania and Georgia while overtaking Biden in either Nevada or Arizona.
Top US media networks gave Biden a 264 to 214 lead in Electoral College votes, which are largely determined by state population, after he captured the crucial states of Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday.
As demonstrators marched in several US cities for a second straight day, the election lay in the hands of civil employees who were methodically counting hundreds of thousands of ballots, many of which were sent by mail amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Final results in each state could take days. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on Thursday afternoon the state still had about 350,000 ballots yet to count but expected the vast majority to be tallied by Friday.
In Georgia, Gabriel Sterling, an election official, said it would “take time” to process tens of thousands of remaining ballots. Arizona, where there were at least 400,000 ballots remaining, and Nevada, which had 190,000 uncounted votes, were also expected to take days to complete their tallies.
Trump’s remarks followed a series of Twitter posts from Trump earlier in the day that called for vote counting to stop, even though he currently trails Biden in enough states to hand the Democrat the presidency.
Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, pursued a flurry of lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, though judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly rejected the challenges. Legal experts said the cases had little chance of affecting the electoral outcome.
Biden wrote on Twitter shortly after Trump’s White House appearance, “No one is going to take our democracy away from us.” In earlier remarks from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, Biden expressed confidence he would win and urged calm as votes were tallied.
Democratic US presidential nominee Joe Biden is accompanied by vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris as he makes a statement on the 2020 US presidential election results during a brief appearance before reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, US, November 5, 2020. -REUTERS
“Democracy’s sometimes messy,” Biden said. “It sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years in a system of governance that has been the envy of the world.”
