Joe Biden
issued a very short statement on the current state of play in the presidential
race, emphasizing that election officials must count every valid vote that was
cast. Biden noted he and his running mate, Kamala Harris, 'continue to feel
very good' about the ultimate result.
Speaking at
the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, the Democratic nominee also noted
the country is nearing 240,000 deaths from coronavirus and expressed sympathy
for Americans who had lost loved ones to the virus
Trump repeats false claim of election win as
Biden calls for 'patience'
President rails against ‘election interference’ as
Biden says ‘each ballot must be counted’
Julian
Borger, David Smith and Joan E Greve in Washington
Fri 6 Nov
2020 03.02 GMTFirst published on Thu 5 Nov 2020 16.16 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/05/biden-trump-us-election-2020-votes-count
Joe Biden
urged calm across the US on Thursday night as he held on to a lead against Donald
Trump that brought the Democratic challenger tantalisingly close to the
presidency – even as votes were still being counted in a handful of critical
states.
Facing
possible defeat after one term, Trump from the White House appeared to dig in
for a long fight, falsely claiming: “If you count the legal votes, I easily
win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from
us.
“If you
count the votes that came in late, we’re looking at them very strongly, a lot
of votes came in late,” he said, in a tone that seemed calculated to inflame
divisions. There was no evidence that illegal or late votes were being counted,
nor that the election was being stolen.
Trump went
on to rail against “historic election interference from big media, big money
and big tech … The pollsters got it knowingly wrong.”
Biden and
his running mate, the California senator Kamala Harris, on the other hand had
emerged in Biden’s home state of Delaware, telling the country that “each
ballot must be counted.
“In
America, the vote is sacred,” Biden said. “Democracy is sometimes messy. It
sometimes requires a little patience, as well. But that patience has been
rewarded now for 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of
the world.”
Biden noted
he and Harris “continue to feel very good” about the ultimate result of the
race. “We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I
will be declared the winners,” Biden said.
As the
country remained on edge, awaiting the declaration of a victory almost 48 hours
after the polls had closed and as sporadic protests have broken out in places
such as Arizona, Michigan, Portland and New York, Biden said: “I ask everyone
to stay calm.”
While many
high-profile Republicans have not commented on Trump’s latest falsehoods,
several GOP lawmakers denounced his baseless allegations about fraud, with Paul
Mitchell, a Michigan congressman, saying that every vote would be counted,
adding that “anything less harms the integrity of our elections and is
dangerous for our democracy”. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois GOP congressman,
tweeted: “STOP Spreading debunked misinformation... This is getting insane.”
Three major
TV networks also cut away from the president’s live remarks due to the
avalanche of lies, with news anchors saying it was “dangerous” to air his
“absolutely untrue” statements.
The White
House was set to be decided by razor-thin margins in five battleground states.
Trump was still holding on to leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia but Biden was
rapidly narrowing the gap in the two states as a backlog of postal ballots was
counted. A win in Pennsylvania alone, with its 20 votes in the electoral
college, would be enough to make Biden president.
In Arizona,
a Biden lead was being gradually eroded by late-counted Trump votes. The
Associated Press (AP) and Fox News called the Democrat the winner in the state
on election night, but by Thursday morning no other major TV network had
followed suit. The Guardian, which uses election data from AP, 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 required for victory, so a win in any other state would
be enough.
In Nevada
on Thursday morning, Biden bolstered a very slim lead to about 12,000 (about 1%
of the vote) but there are about 200,000 votes still to be counted. Trump was
leading North Carolina but the outcome depended on mail-in ballots. Jon
Ralston, a leading political analyst in Nevada, tweeted: “I see no path left
for Trump here.”
In the
nationwide popular vote, Biden so far has a record 73.3 m and about 3.7 m more
than Trump.
Jen
O’Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign manager, said during a press call: “Joe
Biden now has won more votes than any presidential candidate in history, and
we’re still counting. Over 140m votes have been counted so far with more than
72m of those votes going to Vice-President Biden.”
Dillon
added: “Because he sees the same data we do and knows he’s losing, Donald Trump
continues to push a flailing strategy designed to prevent people’s votes from
being counted.”
Millions of
Americans got on with their lives on Thursday even as the election, described
as the most important in generations, hung in the balance and moved at an
excruciating pace. The candidates themselves maintained a low public profile.
The
president was also active on Twitter, posting: “Stop the count!”
It was a
confusing plea because in Arizona and Nevada the Trump camp would be relying on
late-counted votes to win. In these south-western states, the campaign 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 centres in
Phoenix in Arizona, Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and Detroit in Michigan, riled
by unfounded claims from Trump and some of his loyalists of widespread
irregularities and the insistence that the reversal of the president’s early
leads in the counts meant the election was being “stolen”.
The
demonstration in Phoenix on Wednesday night saw about 150 Trump supporters
gather outside the Maricopa county elections department chanting “Count the
votes!” and “Where are the votes?” as officials inside the building worked to
tabulate ballots.
Many of the
protesters wore “Make America great again” hats and waved Trump flags. Some
were carrying guns. Sheriff’s deputies wearing tactical gear moved inside the
office as the crowd continued to grow, according to CBS News.
Facebook
said it had taken down a group where Trump supporters posted misinformation,
violent rhetoric and organised protests. The group had grown to more than
365,000 members in one day.
The social
media network said: “In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking
during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the
Steal’, which was creating real-world events.”
The Trump
campaign said it called for a recount in Wisconsin, although CBS News reported
that the state’s top election official said no such request had been received.
Biden led by more than 20,000 ballots out of nearly 3.3m counted.
Wendy
Christensen, the Racine County (Wisconsin) County Clerk says about 102,000
ballots were cast in Tuesday’s presidential election. The ballots are in a
locked room in the Racine County
The Trump
campaign also launched a flurry of lawsuits in four states with an array of
technical challenges. In Michigan, which has already been called by the
Associated Press for Biden, the president’s lawyers lost a legal demand for the
count to be suspended until a campaign representative could be at each postal
ballot counting table.
The
Michigan court of claims judge Cynthia Stephens said: “I have no basis to find
that there is a substantial likelihood of success on the merits.”
In Nevada,
the campaign filed a lawsuit on Thursday claiming about 10,000 voters who cast
ballots there were no longer residents. It has another lawsuit pending in
Nevada challenging the efficacy of signature-matching software, a case the
Trump camp has already lost twice.
In
Pennsylvania, the president’s camp is seeking to ask the supreme court to
reverse its decision allowing the state to extend until Friday the period in
which it accepts late-arriving ballots that were postmarked by Tuesday. Josh
Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, said in a CNN interview the lawsuit
was “more a political document than a legal document”.
On
Thursday, counting was paused in Allegheny county, the greater Pittsburgh area,
until Friday, pending a legal challenge.
The Trump
campaign was distributing email to supporters seeking donations for an
“official election defense fund”.
There was
no proof of voter fraud. Ben Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer, told the
Axios website: “This just smacks of a little bit of desperation.”
The Biden
camp has assembled its own legal teams and launched a “fight fund” to finance
the effort.
Bob Bauer,
a Biden campaign lawyer, said: “These lawsuits don’t have to have merit, that’s
not the purpose. It is to create an opportunity for them to message falsely
about what’s taking place in the electoral process.”
If Trump
wants to go to the supreme court, Bauer added, “he will be in for one of the
most embarrassing defeats a president ever suffered before the highest court of
the land”.
In the
Senate race, Democrats clung on to a slender hope that they might wrest control
of the chamber from Republicans.
One contest
for one Georgia seat has gone to a runoff, and the second seat was close to the
threshold for a runoff on Thursday with the Republican incumbent barely holding
the 50% share in the vote, but votes are still being counted. A tight Senate
race in North Carolina had also not been called by Thursday morning.
The count
was unfolding against the backdrop of the worsening coronavirus pandemic. The
US recorded 102,831 new Covid-19 infections on Wednesday, the first time it had
reported a six-digit number. Even if Trump loses, he will remain in charge of
the pandemic response until inauguration day on 20 January 2021. The pandemic
has killed more than 233,000 people in the US, more than any other country.
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