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US Elections: Joe Biden has achieved 264 electoral votes against 214 so far for Donald Trump. (File)
Washington:
US Democrat Joe Biden took a huge step towards conquering the White House on Wednesday, with victories in Michigan and Wisconsin bringing him close to the majority, but President Donald Trump responded with a diatribe exposing mass fraud and he asked for the counting of votes to be stopped.
In a short speech on national television, flanked by American flags and his elected vice president Kamala Harris, Biden said he has not yet declared the victory, but said that “when the count is over, we believe we will be the winners.”
By overturning the northern battlefields of Michigan and Wisconsin, Biden has won 264 electoral votes against Trump’s 214 so far. Adding six from Nevada, where he is slightly ahead, would reach the magic number of 270 needed to win the White House.
In stark contrast to Trump’s increasingly heated rhetoric about being cheated, Biden sought to project calm, reaching a nation torn apart by four years of polarizing leadership and traumatized by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I know how deep and hard the opposing views are in our country about so many things,” said Biden, 77.
“But I also know this: to make progress we must stop treating our adversaries as enemies. We are not enemies. What unites us as Americans is much stronger than anything that can separate us.”
The US presidential elections are not decided by popular vote, but by securing a majority in the state-by-state electoral college, which has 538 members.
US media organizations called Michigan for Biden after he took the lead of nearly 70,000 with 97% of the ballots counted. Previously, Biden claimed Wisconsin, with a tighter but insurmountable advantage.
This, along with Arizona – another Trump state that Biden overturned – has put the Democrat on hand to make Trump a president for just one term.
The results were still being tabulated in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, all close contests, as well as in trusted Republican Alaska. Counting has been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic and the record number of cards sent by post that can take longer to process.
Trump claims he was cheated
However, Trump, 74, unilaterally claimed the victory and made it clear he would not accept the reported results, releasing unprecedented allegations – unsupported by any evidence – of fraud.
“Last night I was driving, often solidly, in many key states, in almost every democratic managed and controlled case,” Trump tweeted. “Then, one by one, they began to magically disappear as the surprise ballots were counted.”
Trump’s campaign announced a lawsuit to attempt to suspend vote-counting in Michigan, where he said his team was denied proper access to watch the vote-count.
The campaign alleged it was also suing to stop the vote counting in Pennsylvania – after the president called for the Supreme Court to intervene overnight to rule out mail order processing after polling closed.
And he asked for a recount in Wisconsin, citing “irregularities”.
The president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, spoke to the media in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, accusing the Democrats of sending fraudulent ballots. It also provided no evidence.
“This is how they intend to win,” Giuliani said. “We won’t let them get away with it.”
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said they had won in Pennsylvania, despite the result being still being calculated, and turned down the call giving Biden an Arizona win.
Campaign adviser Jason Miller told reporters that Trump’s re-election “will be clear to the entire nation” by the end of the week.
“We must be patient”
Unless a candidate reaches enough states for total victory first, the fight could end in Pennsylvania, which will likely see the more messy counting process.
Here, Trump had about 500,000 votes ahead with an estimated 78% of the votes counted, but votes were expected from the highly democratic parts of the state, promising to level things off.
“We have to be patient,” said Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf. “We may not know the results today.
“There are millions of mail-order votes,” he said. “They will be counted accurately and will be counted completely.”
The Democratic governor shrugged off White House criticism of the slow counting of votes and said “our democracy has been tested in these elections.”
“Pennsylvania will have fair elections,” he said. “And those elections will be free from outside influence.”
The rush to the White House and the recriminations evoked memories of the 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.
That run, hinging on a handful of votes in Florida, ultimately ended up in the Supreme Court, which interrupted a recount while Bush was ahead.
The US Elections Project has estimated total turnout at a record 160 million voters, including more than 101.1 million early voters, 65.2 million of whom voted by mail.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by the NDTV staff and is posted by a syndicated feed.)
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