Democrat Joe Biden inched nearer to victory on Thursday over Donald Trump in an exceedingly close U.S. election that hinged on razor-thin margins in a handful of states, while the Republican president launched a flurry of lawsuits hoping to slow down his opponent.
Tensions rose in some places as the ballot counting dragged on two days after polls closed, with a second day of sometimes dueling street demonstrations over the integrity of the election.
Biden, the former U.S. vice president, was continuing to cut into Trump’s leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia while holding on to slim margins in Nevada and Arizona.
Trump, who during the long and rancorous campaign attacked the integrity of the U.S. voting system, has again alleged voting fraud without providing evidence, filed lawsuits and called for at least one state recount.
The latest move by Trump’s campaign was a lawsuit to be announced later on Thursday alleging voting fraud in Nevada, another of the crucial states where he narrowly trails Biden.
Some legal experts called the challenges a long shot unlikely to affect the eventual outcome of the election, one of the most unusual presidential races in modern U.S. history due to the coronavirus pandemic. Concern about the virus caused a huge jump in people voting by mail, delaying the results.
Still, Biden was leading in Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona and closing in on Trump in Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Multiple Trump lawsuits and a recount request would have to succeed and find in some cases tens of thousands of invalid ballots to reverse the result if Biden does prevail.
“What we are seeing on these legal suits are that they are meritless, and nothing more than an attempt to distract and delay what is now inevitable: Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States,” Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters.
Trump’s campaign predicted victory, with campaign manager Bill Stepien saying, “Donald Trump is alive and well” in the election.
Some of the outstanding votes in Georgia and Pennsylvania were clustered in places expected to lean Democratic - like the Atlanta and Philadelphia areas.
In Georgia, officials expressed hope that they would have a resolution in their vote count by the end of Thursday. Trump’s eroding lead stood at around 14,000, with about 2 percent of the ballots remaining to be tallied. Trump’s lead was about 115,000 votes in Pennsylvania, with about 8 percent of the ballots left to be counted.
Trump has to win the states where he is still ahead, including North Carolina, plus either Arizona or Nevada to triumph and avoid becoming the first incumbent U.S. president to lose a re-election bid since fellow Republican George H.W. Bush in 1992.
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