Biden on cusp of White House victory, Trump turns to courts

WASHINGTON: 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.

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."

"We think that as soon, possibly, as the end of tomorrow, on Friday it will be clear to the American public that President Trump and Vice President (Mike) Pence will serve another four years in the White House," Miller told reporters.

The current Electoral College tallies say otherwise with Biden on track to win Arizona and Nevada and possibly even pick off Georgia and Pennsylvania.

"Let me be very clear, our data shows that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States," his campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon told reporters. "We're very confident, whatever happens with the counting and the timing, we will come out ahead."

Trump is currently ahead in Georgia and Pennsylvania but Biden has been chipping away at his leads as the votes continue to be tallied -- slowly in some states this year because of the huge volume of mail-in votes due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump had a roughly 18,000 vote lead in Georgia early Thursday with about 60,000 votes remaining to be counted, much of it from the heavily Democratic suburbs of Atlanta.

He was leading by about 122,000 votes in Pennsylvania with 91 percent of the vote counted but Biden has been narrowing the margin.

"STOP THE COUNT!" Trump tweeted on Thursday morning. "ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!"

While Trump was demanding that vote-counting be halted in Georgia and Pennsylvania -- where he is leading -- his supporters and campaign were insisting that it continue in Arizona and Nevada, where he is trailing.

Trump prematurely declared victory Wednesday and threatened to seek Supreme Court intervention to stop vote-counting but it has continued nonetheless.

'STOP THE COUNT!'

Fox News and AP news agency projected Biden as the winner in Arizona on Tuesday night. But other outlets have yet to do so and vote-counting continues in the state, where Biden has a fairly healthy 69,000 vote lead.

With 86 percent of the vote counted, Biden had a razor-thin 8,000-vote lead in Nevada, which has six electoral votes.

Nevada was won by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and much of the outstanding vote is from areas of the western state that skew towards Democrats.

In Georgia, Gabriel Sterling of the Secretary of State's office, appealed for patience and dismissed Trump campaign claims of irregularities among election workers.

"These people are not involved in voter fraud," Sterling said.

"This is a long process, but I think all of us would agree that having an accurate count is much more vital," he added.

Pennsylvania, Biden's birthplace, has 20 electoral votes and was considered one of the major prizes in Tuesday's election.

Georgia, with 16 electoral votes, has been a reliably Republican state but could land in the Democratic column for the first time since Bill Clinton won it in 1992.

Trump won both states in 2016 in carving out his upset victory over Hillary Clinton.

With potential defeat looming, Trump has launched multiple legal challenges, announcing lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania and demanding a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden won by just 20,000 votes.

Bob Bauer, a lawyer for the Biden campaign, dismissed the slew of lawsuits as "meritless."

"All of this is intended to create a large cloud," Bauer said. "But it's not a very thick cloud. We see through it. So do the courts and so do election officials."

'Count the votes!'

In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign said a court had given the green light for its "observers" to watch ballot-counting in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia. Earlier Trump supporters had been kept as much as 100 feet (30 meters) away.

Attempts to stop vote-counting in states where Trump is leading were not restricted to the courts.

In the Michigan city of Detroit, a majority-Black Democratic stronghold, a crowd of mostly-white Trump supporters chanting "Stop the count!" tried to barge into an election office Wednesday before being blocked by security.

Television networks have projected a Biden win in Michigan, but final ballots are still being counted.

In the Arizona county of Maricopa, which includes Phoenix, an aggressive pro-Trump crowd gathered outside a counting office chanting "Count the votes!" -- some of them openly carrying firearms, which is legal in the state.

In stark contrast to Trump's unprecedented rhetoric about being cheated, Biden has sought to project calm, reaching out to a nation torn by four years of polarizing leadership and traumatized by the Covid-19 pandemic.

"We have to stop treating our opponents as enemies," Biden said Wednesday. "What brings us together as Americans is so much stronger than anything that can tear us apart."

The tight White House race and recriminations have evoked memories of the 2000 election between Republican George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

That race, which hinged on a handful of votes in Florida, eventually ended up in the Supreme Court, which halted a recount while Bush was ahead.