With his re-election chances fading as more votes are counted in a handful of battleground states, US President Donald 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.
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s lead had shrunk from 319,000 on Wednesday afternoon to 64,000 a day later, while his margin in Georgia fell from 68,000 to fewer than 4,000. Those numbers were expected to continue to move in Biden’s favor, with many of the outstanding ballots from areas that typically vote Democratic, including the cities of Philadelphia and Atlanta.
Biden, meanwhile, saw his lead in Arizona contract from 93,000 to 65,000; he was ahead in Nevada by only 11,000 votes.
Biden would become the next president by winning Pennsylvania, or by winning two out of the trio of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Trump’s likeliest path appeared narrower – he needed to hang onto Pennsylvania and Georgia while overtaking Biden in either Nevada or Arizona.
Most major television networks gave Biden a 253 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.
“MESSY” DEMOCRACY
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.
