US Election: Biden moves to clinch victory as Trump heads for court; awaiting six states

As Democrat Joe Biden inches closer to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, President Donald Trump’s campaign put into action the legal strategy the president had signaled for weeks: attacking the integrity of the voting process in states where the result could mean his defeat.

Democrats scoffed at the legal challenges the president’s campaign filed Wednesday in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

In spite of the aggressive move, the flurry of court action did not seem obviously destined to impact the election’s outcome.

The new filings, joining existing Republican legal challenges in Pennsylvania and Nevada, demand better access for campaign observers to locations where ballots are being processed and counted, and raised absentee ballot concerns, the campaign said.

The Associated Press called Michigan for Democrat Joe Biden on Wednesday. The AP has not called Nevada, Pennsylvania or Georgia.

The Trump campaign also is seeking to intervene in a Pennsylvania case at the Supreme Court that deals with whether ballots received up to three days after the election can be counted, deputy campaign manager Justin Clark said.

Trump’s campaign also announced that it would ask for a recount in Wisconsin, a state the AP called for Biden on Wednesday afternoon. Campaign manager Bill Stepien cited “irregularities in several Wisconsin counties,” without providing specifics.

Biden said Wednesday the count should continue in all states, adding, “No one’s going to take our democracy away from us — not now, not ever.”

Campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said legal challenges were not the behavior of a winning campaign.

“What makes these charades especially pathetic is that while Trump is demanding recounts in places he has already lost, he’s simultaneously engaged in fruitless attempts to halt the counting of votes in other states in which he’s on the road to defeat,” Bates said in a statement.

Vote counting, meanwhile, stretched into Thursday. Every election, results reported on election night are unofficial and ballot counting extends past Election Day. But this year, unlike in previous years, states were contending with an avalanche of mail ballots driven by fears of voting in person during a pandemic.

Mail ballots normally take more time to verify and count. This year, because of the large numbers of mail ballots and a close race, results were expected to take longer.

Meanwhile, Democrat Joe Biden took a huge step Wednesday to capturing the White House, with wins in Michigan and Wisconsin bringing him close to a majority, but President Donald Trump responded with fury as his campaign sued to suspend vote counting.

In a brief address on national television, flanked by American flags and his vice presidential pick Kamala Harris, Biden said he wasn’t yet declaring victory, but that “when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.”

By flipping the northern battlegrounds of Michigan and Wisconsin, Biden reached 264 electoral votes against 214 so far for Trump.

By adding the six of Nevada, where he is narrowly ahead, or the larger prizes of hard-fought Georgia or Pennsylvania, Biden would hit 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 out to a nation torn by four years of polarizing leadership and traumatized by the Covid-19 pandemic, with new daily infections Wednesday close to hitting 100,000 for the first time.

“I know how deep and hard the opposing views are in our country on so many things,” Biden, 77, said.

“But I also know this as well: to make progress we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies. What brings us together as Americans is so much stronger than anything that can tear us apart.”

American presidential elections are decided not by the 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 where he had a lead of some 120,000 votes.

Earlier, Biden claimed Wisconsin, with a narrower but insurmountable lead.

The two states, along with Arizona — another that Biden was projected to flip — put the Democrat within arm’s reach of making Trump the first one-term president in 28 years.

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