WILMINGTON (DELAWARE) - Democratic candidate Joe Biden has won the two crucial battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday (Nov 4) afternoon, US networks projected, putting him closer to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, although the race remained too close to call.
With Michigan’s 16 electoral votes and Wisconsin's 10, Mr Biden now has a total of 264 – six shy of the 270 needed, according to US network projections.
President Donald Trump's campaign said it would seek a recount in Wisconsin and file legal suits to stop the counting of votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Alaska, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina have yet to be called, but if Mr Biden wins Nevada where he has a slim lead, it would give him the six votes needed.
Speaking from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, Mr Biden said he was not declaring victory but that vote counts from Wisconsin, Michigan and even Pennsylvania showed he was winning in enough states to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
"I am not here to declare that I have won. I am here to report that when the count is finished, I believe I will be the winner," he said, calling for unity in the aftermath of an election marked by rancour.
Mr Biden said that with all the votes counted, he had won Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes by 20,000 votes, "virtually the same margin President Trump won the state by four years ago", he added.
The Wisconsin race was called by the Associated Press at 3.16am Singapore time, although the Trump campaign had already said before then that it would request a recount.
People react as the numbers for Michigan and Wisconsin were announced in Washington, US, on Nov 4, 2020. PHOTO: REUTERS A poll worker processing absentee ballots at the Milwaukee Central Count in Wisconsin, on Nov 3, 2020. PHOTO: REUTERS
In Wisconsin, a recount can be requested if the margin between the top two candidates is less than 1 per cent, said the New York Times.
"Despite ridiculous public polling used as a voter suppression tactic, Wisconsin has been a razor thin race as we always knew it would be," said Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien in a statement. "The President is well within the threshold to request a recount and we will immediately do so."
Mr Stepien said that the Trump campaign had not been given "meaningful access" to several counting locations in Michigan and had filed a suit to halt counting until access was given. He added later that the Trump campaign would also mount a challenge in Pennsylvania.
Early poll counts on Tuesday night had Mr Trump winning more votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, but Mr Biden gained ground as absentee and mail-in ballots, as well as ballots from Democratic strongholds, were counted later.
He also claimed victory in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, where counting is still ongoing and where he has a lead for now over Mr Biden.
"Additionally, we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact, there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!" Mr Trump said in a tweet that Twitter marked as misleading.
.....there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!
WASHINGTON: Democrat Joe Biden has won the crucial battleground state of Michigan, US networks projected on Wednesday (Nov 4), meaning the former vice president has flipped another state won by President Donald Trump in 2016.
CNN and NBC News projected the win for Biden in the Midwestern state, which unexpectedly went to Trump by less than half a percentage point in 2016 in one of the stunning state defeats suffered by Hillary Clinton.
With Michigan's 16 electoral votes, Biden now has a total of 264 - six shy of the magic number of 270 needed to win the US presidency, according to US network projections.
"After a long night of counting, it's clear that we're winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency," Biden said in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
"I'm not here to declare that we won. But I am here to report, when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners," Biden added.
Michigan, a battleground state that will help determine who wins the US presidential election, is still counting "tens of thousands" of ballots according to a top state official.
"We know that tens of thousands of ballots are still outstanding and need to be tabulated" in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint, Kalamazoo and other cities, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in a Wednesday morning news conference.
She said the outstanding vote count was just over 100,000, with most being absentee ballots.
With 99 per cent of the vote counted, Biden held a lead of just over 60,000 votes, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Benson told the news conference she was confident the state's election process could withstand a legal challenge. Nevertheless, Trump's campaign later filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the count in Michigan, asserting it had not been allowed to observe the opening of ballots.
Emotions were running high on Wednesday afternoon in downtown Detroit, where city election officials blocked about 30 people, mostly Republicans, from entering the vote-counting hall at TCF Center due to capacity restrictions to fight the spread of COVID-19.
Democrats said they had also been barred, and one poll worker told Reuters Republicans were "trying to slow down and obstruct the counting".
Election challengers look through the doors of the central counting board on Nov 4, 2020, in Detroit. (Photo: AP/Carlos Osorio)
Detroit police were called to enforce the decision and some of those barred from the hall grew agitated when poll officials blocked the windows with pizza boxes and cardboard to prevent challengers from viewing inside.
Many stood outside the hall voicing their protest and singing "God Bless America," while a second group of Republican election challengers who had been denied entry gathered in a prayer circle outside the convention centre and also chanted "Stop the vote" and "Stop the count".
Greg King of the Trump campaign said the problem arose when people left for lunch and did not sign out, so when they returned it created the appearance of too many people in the room.
A Democratic poll observer, Liz Linkewitz, said she and other Democrats had been barred as well and it was not a partisan issue.
“I'm very upset," said Sherman Rogers, 53, a Republican who was among those barred from entering.
A city election commissioner later came out and explained that controlling the number of people in the room was necessary to protect against the coronavirus and there were still poll challengers from all parties in the hall. He left after people kept shouting over him.
Benson earlier said she was optimistic the majority of ballots cast on or before Election Day will be tabulated in an unofficial count by the end of the day.
"The number of outstanding ballots is still greater than the margin of difference in many races," Benson said. "Our goal is to ensure that we are being transparent, but also fully accurate."
WASHINGTON: The Trump campaign said it filed lawsuits on Wednesday (Nov 4) in Pennsylvania and Michigan, laying the groundwork for contesting the outcome in undecided battleground states that could determine whether President Donald Trump gets another four years in the White House.
Suits in both states are demanding better access for campaign observers to locations where ballots are being processed and counted, the campaign said. The 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.
The campaign said it is calling for a temporary halt in the counting in both states until it is given “meaningful" access in numerous locations and allowed to review ballots that already have been opened and processed. Trump is running slightly behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden in Michigan. The president is ahead in Pennsylvania but his margin is shrinking as more mailed ballots are counted.
There have been no reports of fraud or any type of ballot concerns out of Pennsylvania. The state had 3.1 million mail-in ballots that take time to count and an order allows them to be counted up until Friday if they are postmarked by Nov 3.
The campaign also said it would ask for a recount in Wisconsin, a state The Associated Press called for Biden on Wednesday afternoon. Campaign manager Bill Stepien cited “irregularities in several Wisconsin counties”.
The actions came as elections officials counted votes in several undecided states that are crucial to the outcome of the presidential election.
The former vice president’s campaign meanwhile welcomed the ongoing vote count and a Biden campaign attorney said they are ready for any legal fight. And Michigan Democrats said the suit was a longshot.
Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan, a liberal advocacy group, said Trump only filed the suit to stop The Associated Press and other media outlets from calling the race for Biden.
“This is a Hail Mary,” he said.
The campaign didn't immediately make public a copy of the lawsuit and it wasn't clear what in areas they argue they were denied access.
Poll watchers from both sides were plentiful on Wednesday at one major polling place in question — Detroit's TCF Center, the Associated Press observed. They checked in at a table near the entrance to the convention centre’s Hall E and strolled among the tables where ballot processing was taking place. In some cases, they arrived en masse and huddled together for a group discussion before fanning out to the floor. Uniformed Detroit police officers were on hand to make sure everyone was behaving.
Mark Brewer, a former state Democratic chairman who said he was observing the Detroit vote counting as a volunteer lawyer, said he had been at the TCF arena all day and had talked with others who had been there the past couple of days. He said Republicans had not been denied access.
“This is the best absentee ballot counting operation that Detroit has ever had. They are counting ballots very efficiently, despite the obstructing tactics of the Republicans.”
Republicans already are mounting other legal challenges involving absentee votes in Pennsylvania and Nevada, contesting local decisions that could take on national significance in the close election.
Earlier Wednesday, Trump said he'll take the presidential election to the Supreme Court, but it's unclear what he meant in a country in which vote tabulations routinely continue beyond Election Day, and states largely set the rules for when the count has to end.
“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court — we want all voting to stop,” Trump told supporters at the White House.
Biden's campaign called Trump's statement "outrageous, unprecedented, and incorrect".
“If the president makes good on his threat to go to court to try to prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort," Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement. "And they will prevail.”
Election law expert Richard Hasen wrote in Slate on Sunday that "there has never been any basis to claim that a ballot arriving on time cannot be counted if officials cannot finish their count on election night”.
Ohio State University election law professor Edward Foley wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “The valid votes will be counted. SCOTUS would be involved only if there were votes of questionable validity that would make a difference, which might not be the case. The rule of law will determine the official winner of the popular vote in each state. Let the rule of law work.”
In any event, there's no way to go directly to the high court with a claim of fraud. Trump and his campaign could allege problems with the way votes are counted in individual states, but they would have to start their legal fight in a state or lower federal court.
There is a pending Republican appeal at the Supreme Court over whether Pennsylvania can count votes that arrive in the mail from Wednesday to Friday, an extension ordered by the state's top court over the objection of Republicans. That case does not involve ballots already cast and in the possession of election officials, even if they are yet to be counted.
The high court refused before the election to rule out those ballots, but conservative justices indicated they could revisit the issue after the election. The Supreme Court also refused to block an extension for the receipt and counting of absentee ballots in North Carolina beyond the three days set by state law.
Even a small number of contested votes could matter if either state determines the winner of the election and the gap between Trump and Biden is so small that a few thousand votes, or even a few hundred, could make the difference.
WASHINGTON: Democrat Joe Biden has won the vital battleground of Wisconsin, flipping a state won by Donald Trump in 2016 and boosting his own chances of winning the White House.
The Associated Press called Wisconsin for Biden after election officials in the state said all outstanding ballots had been counted, save for a few hundred in one township and an expected small number of provisional ballots.
Neither candidate has cleared the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, and the margins were tight in several other battleground states. Top advisers for both Biden and Trump on Wednesday morning expressed confidence that they respectively had the likelier path to victory in the outstanding states.
Trump’s campaign has requested a recount. Statewide recounts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote tally by only a few hundred votes; Biden leads by 0.624 percentage point out of nearly 3.3 million ballots counted.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of votes were still to be counted in Pennsylvania.
Barack Obama won Wisconsin by seven points in 2012. But Hillary Clinton famously did not even bother to campaign there in 2016, and ended up suffering an embarrassing defeat to Trump, by less than a percentage point.
Election workers process mail-in and absentee ballots for the 2020 general election in the United States at West Chester University on Nov 4, 2020, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. (Photo: AP/Matt Slocum)
The margins were exceedingly tight in states across the country, with the candidates trading wins in battlegrounds. Trump picked up Florida, the largest of the swing states, while Biden flipped Arizona, a state that has reliably voted Republican in recent elections.
The unsettled presidential race came as Democrats entered election night confident not only in Biden’s prospects, but also in the party’s chances of taking control of the Senate. But the GOP held several seats that were considered vulnerable, including in Iowa, Texas and Kansas. Disappointed Democrats lost House seats but were expected to retain control there.
The high-stakes election was held against the backdrop of a historic pandemic that has killed more than 232,000 Americans and wiped away millions of jobs. Both candidates spent months pressing dramatically different visions for the nation’s future, including on racial justice, and voters responded in huge numbers, with more than 100 million people casting votes ahead of Election Day.
Trump, in an extraordinary move from the White House, issued premature claims of victory and said he would take the election to the Supreme Court to stop the counting. It was unclear exactly what legal action he could try to pursue.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell discounted the president’s quick claim of victory, saying it would take a while for states to conduct their vote counts. The Kentucky Republican said on Wednesday that “claiming you’ve won the election is different from finishing the counting”.
The president stayed out of the public eye but took to Twitter to suggest, without basis, that the election was being tainted by late-counted ballots. Twitter flagged a number of Trump's tweets, noting some of the information shared was “disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
Biden, briefly appearing in front of supporters in Delaware, urged patience, saying the election "ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted”.
“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,” Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people.”
An election worker handles ballots as vote counting in the general election continues at State Farm Arena on Nov 4, 2020, in Atlanta. (Photo: AP/Brynn Anderson)
Vote tabulations routinely continue beyond Election Day, and states largely set the rules for when the count has to end. In presidential elections, a key point is the date in December when presidential electors met. That’s set by federal law.
Several states allow mailed-in votes to be accepted after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday. That includes Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by Nov 3 can be accepted if they arrive up to three days after the election.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said he had “promised Pennsylvanians that we would count every vote and that’s what we’re going to do".
Trump appeared to suggest those ballots should not be counted, and that he would fight for that outcome at the high court. But legal experts were dubious of Trump's declaration. Trump has appointed three of the high court's nine justices including, most recently, Amy Coney Barrett.
The Trump campaign on Wednesday pushed Republican donors to dig deeper into their pockets to help finance legal challenges. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, during a donor call, spoke plainly: “The fight’s not over. We’re in it.” Biden's running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, made a pitch on Twitter to supporters to pitch in US$5 to help pay for a fight that could “stretch on for weeks”.
Democrats typically outperform Republicans in mail voting, while the GOP looks to make up ground in Election Day turnout. That means the early margins between the candidates could be influenced by which type of votes - early or Election Day - were being reported by the states.
Throughout the campaign, Trump cast doubt about the integrity of the election and repeatedly suggested that mail-in ballots should not be counted. Both campaigns had teams of lawyers at the ready to move into battleground states if there were legal challenges.
Trump kept several states, including Texas, Iowa and Ohio, where Biden had made a strong play in the final stages of the campaign. But Biden picked off states where Trump sought to compete, including New Hampshire and Minnesota. But Florida was the biggest, fiercely contested battleground on the map, with both campaigns battling over the 29 Electoral College votes that went to Trump.
The president adopted Florida as his new home state, wooed its Latino community, particularly Cuban-Americans, and held rallies there incessantly. For his part, Biden deployed his top surrogate - former President Barack Obama - there twice in the campaign’s closing days and benefited from a US$100 million pledge in the state from Michael Bloomberg.
The momentum from early voting carried into Election Day, as an energised electorate produced long lines at polling sites throughout the country. Turnout was higher than in 2016 in numerous counties, including all of Florida, nearly every county in North Carolina and more than 100 counties in both Georgia and Texas. That tally seemed sure to increase as more counties reported their turnout figures.
Election personnel handle ballots as vote counting in the general election continues at State Farm Arena on Nov 4, 2020, in Atlanta. (Photo: AP/Brynn Anderson)
Voters braved worries of the coronavirus, threats of polling place intimidation and expectations of long lines caused by changes to voting systems, but appeared undeterred as turnout appeared it would easily surpass the 139 million ballots cast four years ago.
On Wednesday, some awoke to fresh anxiety about an election undecided and what could be ahead.
“Honestly I’m just more concerned about what’s gonna happen after we find out,” said Deion Flan, 30, a voter in Atlanta. “I just want everything to just go back to the American way. It’s the tension of what could happen, what may happen, what’s going to happen after.”
With the coronavirus now surging anew, voters ranked the pandemic and the economy as top concerns in the race between Trump and Biden, according to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate.
Voters were especially likely to call the public health crisis the nation’s most important issue, with the economy following close behind. Fewer named health care, racism, law enforcement, immigration or climate change
The survey found that Trump’s leadership loomed large in voters’ decision-making. Nearly two-thirds of voters said their vote was about Trump - either for him or against him.
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump alleged on Wednesday (Nov 4) that there had been "surprise ballot dumps" in states where he had been leading Democrat Joe Biden in the race for the White House.
"Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled," Trump tweeted. "Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted."
Twitter has labelled Trump's comments as "misleading".
It had also taken a similar action against an earlier tweet by the president.
Trump did not offer any evidence for his allegation of "ballot dumps" and there have been no reports of any irregularities.
The leads in numerous states have shifted back-and-forth between the candidates as votes are counted.
Trump, who overnight prematurely declared himself the winner of Tuesday's election, has spent months denouncing mail-in ballots, making unsubstantiated claims that they are liable to fraud.
In every US presidential election, officials normally take several days to process provisional and mail-in ballots. The counting of additional ballots is no surprise, and neither is the swing to Biden, which was widely predicted and discussed extensively in the run-up to the vote.
Biden's campaign said on Wednesday that the former US vice president was on track to win the 2020 election, with expected victories in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Campaign manager Jennifer O'Malley Dillon said she expected the former US vice president to have more than 270 electoral college votes later on Wednesday. She told reporters she believed Biden has already won Wisconsin and was expected to win Nevada.
The usage of mail-in ballots soared this election amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the US Elections Project said a record 65.2 million Americans voted by mail.
Mr Biden's victory in Arizona, a state Mr Trump won in 2016, gives him more breathing room as the "Blue Wall" states remain uncounted.
Even without Pennsylvania, Mr Biden could now reach exactly 270 electoral votes - the minimum necessary to win - if he can win Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as Nevada, where he was leading early on Wednesday (Nov 4).
Those states still have significant numbers of votes outstanding from absentee voters and large urban counties that tend to vote Democratic. Election officials in both states said it would be later Wednesday before they could finish counting those votes.
The difference-maker for Mr Biden could end up being a single electoral vote from the second congressional district of Nebraska, one of two states that splits its votes. Mr Trump won that district in 2016 but Mr Biden won it on Tuesday.
Georgia and North Carolina would give Mr Biden additional options, but Mr Trump appears to have leads in both those states. A Biden win in Nevada, a state the Democratic contender Mrs Hillary Clinton won in 2016, wouldn't help him gain ground on Trump.
Mr Trump needs at least four of the following states to pass 270 electoral votes: Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He won them all in 2016. If Mr Biden wins any two of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, he will win.
There is a scenario in which the race could come down to a single electoral vote - or even a tie. Maine also splits its votes by congressional district, and one of its two districts remains up for grabs.
If Mr Trump wins that vote - and loses Wisconsin and North Carolina - both Mr Biden and Mr Trump will have 269 electoral votes. In that case, Mr Trump would likely win the tiebreaker vote in the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets a single vote.
