As Joe Biden amassed small but stable leads in critical states that edged him closer on Wednesday to winning the presidency, President Trump and Republicans threatened legal challenges as they sought to shift the battle for the White House from the ballot box to the courts, The Washington Post reported.
The knife-edge US presidential race tilted toward Democrat Joe Biden early Thursday, with wins in Michigan and Wisconsin bringing him close to a majority, but President Donald Trump claimed he was being cheated and went to court to try and stop vote counting.
Tallying of votes continued through a second night in the remaining battleground states where huge turnout and a mountain of mail-in ballots sent by voters trying to avoid exposure to the coronavirus made the job all the harder.
Both candidates still had paths to winning the White House by hitting the magic majority threshold of 270 of the electoral votes awarded to whichever candidate wins the popular vote in a given state.
But momentum moved to Joe Biden, who made a televised speech from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware to say that "when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners."
By flipping the northern battlegrounds of Michigan and Wisconsin, and also winning formerly pro-Trump Arizona, Biden reached 264 electoral votes against 214 so far for Trump.
To reach 270 he was hoping next to add the six electoral votes from Nevada, where he had a small and shrinking lead, or, even better, the larger prizes of hard-fought Georgia or Pennsylvania.
More than 100 million Americans cast their ballots in advance of Tuesday's Election Day, according to the US Elections Project watchdog, a record figure largely attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, reported news agency AFP.
Here are the Live Updates on US Presidential Election Results 2020:
US Democrat Joe Biden said Thursday he has "no doubt" he will defeat President Donald Trump and be declared winner of the US election, insisting that voters remain patient and that the result will be known "very soon".
The head of an international observer mission to the US elections accused Donald Trump on Thursday of a "gross abuse of office" after the president alleged he was being cheated and demanded that vote counting be halted.
Facebook on Thursday said it had taken down a rapidly growing group where supporters of US President Donald Trump posted misinformation, violent rhetoric and organized protests against the baseless claim that Democrats were stealing the election. The group had ballooned to more than 365,000 members in one day.
The dollar slipped and tech stocks rallied further on Thursday as Democrat Joe Biden drew closer to winning the US presidency while the Bank of England became the latest central bank to say it will increase stimulus, reported news agency Reuters. Biden appeared set to defeat Donald Trump as counting continued from Tuesday's election.
Former vice president Joe Biden, making his third run at the White House, was tantalizingly close to victory on Thursday as President Donald Trump sought to stave off defeat with scattershot legal challenges and his campaign insisted he would be reelected, reported news agency AFP. Biden, 77, needs a total of 270 votes to capture the Electoral College that determines the White House winner and the magic figure was in reach with several states expected to announce their results on Thursday. The former senator from Delaware and Democratic hopeful currently has 253 electoral votes -- or 264 if the 11 electoral votes from the southwestern state of Arizona are included. Trump, 74, trails with 214 electoral votes but Jason Miller, his top campaign strategist, said the Republican incumbent will "again win the race."
President Donald Trump's campaign on Thursday will announce a lawsuit alleging voter fraud in Nevada, according to a source familiar with the matter, as the state continued counting ballots in the 2020 US presidential election, reported news agency Reuters. The Trump campaign planned to allege that thousands of people cast ballots who no longer live in the state, the source told Reuters. The Republican president's campaign has already filed lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop vote counting.
President Donald Trump's campaign said on Thursday it expected to launch additional legal action in Pennsylvania and Nevada and predicted that the Republican incumbent would emerge victorious in the polls by as early as Friday evening, reported news agency Reuters. Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told reporters on a conference call that Trump was "alive and well" with regard to the presidential race. Campaign adviser Jason Miller said he expected legal action in Pennsylvania to ensure visibility on previous ballots that have been counted in that state.
US District Judge Emmet Sullivan said Thursday he will sign an order requiring twice daily sweeps at US Postal facilities serving states with extended ballot receipt deadline, reported news agency Reuters. Some states, including Nevada and North Carolina, are counting ballots that are received after Election Day. Plaintiffs' lawyers in an ongoing lawsuit said the Postal Service delivered roughly 150,000 ballots on Wednesday. Of those, roughly 8,000 or 9,000, were delivered after Tuesday even though they had been mailed by Sunday.
Democrat Joe Biden's campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon said on Thursday it may take time to see full voting results in Arizona and that the margin in the state may tighten, reported news agency Reuters.
Twitter flagged a post by Donald Trump on Thursday that said votes received after Election Day in the United States would not be counted, reported news agency Reuters. The company has applied labels to multiple tweets by Trump in recent days, warning users that information is disputed and might be misleading, as he fights Democratic rival Joe Biden to keep his place in the White House. Trump's latest tweet to receive the label on Thursday said: "ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!" It is normal in US elections for states to count votes for days, or even weeks, after voting ends on Election Day.
President Donald Trump's campaign planned to make a announcement in Las Vegas on Thursday at 11:30 ET, the campaign said in a statement as ballot counting in the state's presidential election continued, reported news agency Reuters. The news conference will feature former intelligence official Richard Grenell, former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, Chairman of the American Conservative Union Matt Schlapp and Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald, the statement said.
The head of an international observer mission to the US elections accused Donald Trump on Thursday of a "gross abuse of office" after the president alleged he was being cheated and demanded that vote counting be halted, reported news agency AFP. "The most disturbing thing was that with presidential fanfare of the White House, that is, with all the insignia of power, the American commander-in-chief called for an end to the count because of his purported victory," Michael Link told the German daily Stuttgarter Zeitung. "That was a gross abuse of office," he said, adding that Trump's "claims of manipulation are baseless".
A crowd of Donald Trump supporters, some armed with rifles and handguns, gathered outside an election center in Arizona on Wednesday night after unsubstantiated rumors that votes for the Republican president were deliberately not being counted, reported news agency Reuters. Chanting "Stop the steal!", and "Count my vote", the mostly unmasked protesters stood in front of the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix, as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden held a razor thin lead in the critical battleground state. Some news outlets have called Arizona for Biden, but Trump's campaign says it is still in play.
Joe Biden may have the inside track on Donald Trump to win the White House, but his party's otherwise poor performance on Election Night sets up a gridlock presidency, with faint hopes of achieving liberal policy aspirations.
Despite lingering uncertainty over the U.S. election, the country's ultra-rich already have plenty to celebrate. Tech billionaires in Silicon Valley saw a hotly contested ballot question on the employment status of gig workers pass in their favor, while an Illinois measure to swap the state's flat income tax with a graduated system went down in defeat after Citadel's Ken Griffin spent millions to oppose it. Read more
Democrats entered the 2020 US elections looking to roll back much of the commanding presence Republicans had in state governments, but instead wound up losing ground as votes were counted on Wednesday. Read here
Predictions of widespread violence fizzled on Election Night, but police and businesses across the U.S. are keeping preparations in place as President Donald Trump falsely claims victory -- a scenario that experts warned held a greater potential for unrest. Read more
Top Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders's words nearly two weeks ago about how the US presidential election would turn out and how Donald Trump would react appear to have turned prophetic with how the nail-biting counting process and drama has unfolded. Read more
Thousands of Joe Biden supporters marched Wednesday evening in New York to demand every vote in the tight presidential election be counted, as some Donald Trump supporters protested in Detroit demanding a halt to ballot counting in the key state of Michigan. Read more
Amid the delay and drama over the counting of votes in US presidential elections, thousands of miles away in India, villagers at the ancestoral village of Vice-Presidential nominee Kamala Harris are waiting with bated breadth to see the outcome of the elections. Read more