As the counting of the ballots entered the second day on Thursday, anxiety and tension have heightened in the United States as results from six states held up the emergence of the election winner.
As of Thursday night, results from Arizona (11 votes), Nevada (6 votes), Georgia (16 votes), Pennsylvania (20 votes) Wisconsin (10 votes) and Michigan (16 votes) were being awaited.
While Biden has scored 253 points, President Donald Trump is trailing behind with 213 points. The winner has to score 270 points in the Electoral College system to emerge president.
If Biden gets Nevada, Arizona and Wisconsin in addition to Michigan, he gets his 270 votes.
Trump, however, will need Pennsylvania’s votes and win three states out of Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada or Arizona.
The Trump campaign has attacked the integrity of the voting process with lawsuits in three key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia where the race has not been called and votes are still being counted.
Election officials had cautioned that the winner of the presidential election might be unknown days after the election is over.
Rules in some states don’t allow election workers to begin the labour-intensive work of processing mail-in ballots until Election Day. And with a record number of voters casting their ballots by mail, the influx could delay final tallies for days.
On the allegations by the Trump campaign team, election law experts and state election officials had overwhelmingly said there had been no sign of widespread or even sporadic voter fraud.
They said counting votes just took more time than in past years because the coronavirus pandemic had changed the way people go about it.
But the Trump campaign said the lawsuits were necessary.
Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign attorney, Bob Bauer, said the suits had no merit and were meant to spread a false narrative about the electoral process.
He said it’s more about “Trump’s own effort to discredit the election.”
Trump campaign loses legal fights in Georgia, Michigan
President Donald Trump’s campaign lost court rulings in the closely-contested states of Georgia and Michigan on Thursday, even as it vowed to bring a new lawsuit challenging what it called voting irregularities in Nevada.
In the Georgia case, the campaign alleged 53 late-arriving ballots were mixed with on-time ballots.
In Michigan, it sought to stop votes from being counted and obtain greater access to the tabulation process.
State judges tossed out both the suits on Thursday.
Judge James Bass, a superior court judge in Georgia, said there was “no evidence” that the ballots in question were invalid.
In the Michigan case, Judge Cynthia Stephens said: “I have no basis to find that there is a substantial likelihood of success on the merits.”
Trump allies alleged that there had been voting irregularities in Nevada’s populous Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment by Reuters on the Michigan and Georgia rulings.