US Election: Biden hours from victory but Trump won’t accept defeat

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Joe Biden will address the nation in primetime Friday, his campaign confirmed – pointing to their overwhelming confidence he is about to win the presidential election.

The speech will be delivered regardless of whether the election has been called in his favor, which now appears certain to be either Friday or over the weekend.

The Associated Press said the address would come in primetime, with the exact time so far still flexible while the campaign waits to see if the election will be called in his favor by TV networks and the AP.

The move was confirmed as vote tallies in Pennsylvania and Nevada showed his lead increasing, Arizona continued to be favorable to the Democrat and Georgia headed for a recount with him ahead of Donald Trump.

In the White House, Donald Trump’s inner circle were scrambling to work out how to tell him he had lost, while he vowed defiantly to pursue legal challenges to the count in a series of states, claiming he was fighting for ‘election integrity,’ the day after an extraordinary 17-minute tirade claiming he was the victim of a ‘conspiracy’ and that counting the votes was part of the ‘fraud.’ 

Biden’s campaign has kept ready an outdoor stage at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware for a primetime address and warned TV networks to be prepared for a speech. 

Close supporters of the VP were tipped off Friday to head to the Chase Center in their vehicles. The Democrats have been holding major events drive-in movie theater style in order to ensure proper social distancing of their crowds. The Chase Center parking lot is where his campaign staged fireworks after he accepted the Democratic nomination during the Democratic National Convention, where the major speeches were moved to Wilmington due to the coronavirus pandemic. If the race is called for the former vice president, the event is expected to look the same. 

As it stands, Biden has 253 electoral college votes. He needs 270 to win which is realistic in two ways today. If he wins Pennsylvania, he takes 20 points and no longer needs either Arizona or Nevada. 

But if he wins Arizona – which has 11 – and Nevada – which has 6 – he no longer needs Pennsylvania. All three states are still working through their remaining ballots and it’s unclear when exactly they will finish tallying them up. 

While the country and the world wait for the results, an agonizing three days after the polls closed, Trump is digging his heels into the Presidency, alleging widespread voter fraud and claiming he is the victim of a conspiracy.    

 

On Thursday night, he launched an astonishing, 17-minute tirade from the White House briefing room where he claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy by big tech, big money, the Democrats and the media.  

In a statement on Friday morning, his campaign team said the election was ‘far from over’. They said it was a ‘false projection’ that Biden would win and that they had evidence to prove it. They have presented none so yet. 

The President went on a 2.30am Twitter rampage then resumed it at around 11.30am. 

Biden has been quiet. He spoke last night at a press conference on Thursday evening, telling the country to be ‘calm’ and to wait for the results but that he was confident he as on the path to victory.  

Trump is refusing to accept what Biden’s team is calling the ‘inevitable’.

‘This election is no over. The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final.  Georgia is headed for a recount, where we are confident we will find ballots improperly harvested, and where President Trump will ultimately prevail. 

‘There were many irregularities in Pennsylvania, including having election officials prevent our volunteer legal observers from having meaningful access to vote counting locations.

‘We prevailed in court on our challenge but were deprived of valuable time and denied the transparency we are entitled to under state law. 

‘In Nevada, there appear to be thousands of individuals who improperly cast mail ballots. 

‘Finally, the President is on course to win Arizona outright, despite the irresponsible and erroneous “calling” of the state for Biden by Fox News and the Associated Press. 

‘Biden is relying on these states  for his phony claim on the White House, but once the election is final, President Trump will be re-elected,’ Matt Morgan, his campaign general counsel, said. 

Biden’s team in response told Bloomberg: ‘As we said on July 19th, the American people will decide this election. 

‘And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.’ 

His reluctance to accept the result poses an unprecedented scenario for the country and the world. 

It will make Biden’s transition to power, should he be win enough electoral college votes, more difficult.

Many networks on Thursday night refused to air Trump’s speech. 

ABC, CBS and NBC  cut away from the press conference before it finished, warning their viewers that Trump had made ‘a number of false statements’ that needed clarifying. MSNBC was the first to cut away, as anchor Brian Williams warned ‘here we go again’. Fox News and CNN covered it in full.

In a series of tweets sent at 2.30am, Trump continued his tirade – attacking social media regulation, making baseless claims of fraud, casting doubt over several close Senate races, and calling on the Supreme Court to intervene.  

Having narrowly won the swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan, he has more routes to the White House open to him – with Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina yet to be called. 

A win in Pennsylvania would hand him the presidency even if all the other states go to Trump. Holding his lead in Arizona and Nevada would also hand him the win.

Meanwhile Trump needs most of the outstanding states to go his way to stand a chance of winning.

Biden also gave a speech Thursday, calling for calm and patience while the votes are counted, insisting once again that when the dust has settled he will have beaten Trump.

‘Democracy is sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience as well,’ the former vice president said from the stage of Wilmington’s Queen theater late Thursday afternoon.

‘So I ask everyone to stay calm, all people to stay calm. The process is working. The count is being completed and we’ll know very soon.’

He also tweeted: ‘No one is going to take our democracy away from us. 

‘Not now, not ever. America has come too far, fought too many battles, and endured too much to let that happen. Keep the faith, folks.’ 

Meanwhile Donald Trump Jr gave a speech in Georgia, where Trump’s lead is now just a few hundred votes, calling for his father to ‘fight to the death’ and urging him to ‘go to war’ to ‘expose all of the fraud that has been going on for far too long.’

‘Americans need to know that this is not a banana republic and right now very few people have faith that’s not the case,’ he added. 

At the podium in the briefing room on Thursday night, President Trump read from from a script and listed his grievances at Biden’s campaign, ‘suppression polls’ and ‘fraud.’  

He left without taking a question as CNN’s White House reporter Jim Acosta shouted: ‘Are you a sore loser?’ – then his press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had to scuttle back to the podium because he had forgotten to take his notes with him.

Trump’s condemnation of the entire democratic system and his growing list of enemies was switched off rapidly by TV network after TV network.

MSNBC anchor Brian Williams said as they turned away less than a minute in: ‘Here we go again.’

CNN was among the few channels to air the president’s full speech, after which Anderson Cooper said Trump was ‘like an obese turtle flailing in the sun.’

‘That is the President of the United States. 

‘That is the most powerful person in the world and we see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun realizing his time is over,’ Cooper said on air. 

‘But he just hasn’t accepted it and he wants to take everybody down with him, including this country.’ 

Republicans also turned on him within minutes with Larry Hogan, the Maryland governor, saying: ‘There is no defense. No person or election is more important than our democracy.’ GOP rep Adam Klinzinger called it ‘insane.’

At the briefing room podium – where the only aide with him was White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnanany – Trump appeared downcast as he listed his enemies and claimed a victory which nobody has handed to him.

‘If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,’ he said during what he called a press conference.

Joe Biden tweeted a rebuke shortly after he finished saying: ‘No one is going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever. America has come too far, fought too many battles, and endured too much to let that happen.’

Trump, whose campaign has launched lawsuits in several battleground states, spoke more about the polls than he did about his own campaign, calling them ‘phony’ and ‘suppression polls,’ claiming that errors by pollsters were a deliberate attempt to keep his supporters at home.

Then he turned on his own party saying that because of him was no ‘blue wave,’  referring to Democrats’ failure to win the Senate and add to their majority in the House.

That was a coded attack on Republicans’ most senior figures who have refused to come out in support of his claims of fraud. His son Don Jr. railed against Republicans earlier in similar terms – but Mitch McConnell has said that every vote must be counted.

‘We won by historic numbers. And the pollsters got it knowingly wrong, they got it knowingly wrong. We had polls that were so ridiculous and everybody knew it at the time. There was no blue wave that they predicted,’ Trump said.  

He apoke after a measured Biden asked Americans to be patient and calm as they waited for the final ballots in the presidential race to be counted – amid mounting anxiety over the long wait for results, and concern about public order.

‘Democracy is sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience as well,’ the former vice president said from the stage of Wilmington’s Queen theater late Thursday afternoon.

‘So I ask everyone to stay calm, all people to stay calm. The process is working. The count is being completed and we’ll know very soon.’

In the same brief statement, the Democratic nominee assured supporters that he and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, would come out on top.

In contrast Trump spent the his press conference railing. 

‘We grew our party by 4 million voters, the greatest turnout in Republican party history. Democrats are the party of the big donors, the big media, the big tech, it seems and Republicans have become the party of the American worker and that’s what’s happened,’ Trump said.He accused the media of giving Biden strong poll numbers as a way of keeping his voters at home.

‘As everyone now recognizes media polling was election interference in the truest sense of that word.

‘By powerful special interests, these really phony polls, I have to call them phony polls, state polls, were designed to keep our voters at home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr. Biden and diminish Republicans abilities to raise funds.

‘They were what’s called suppression polls, everyone knows that now. And it’s never been used to the extent that it’s been used on this last election,’ he said.

He went on to accuse Democrats of tinkering with the election in states with outstanding results.

‘There are now only a few states yet to be decided in the presidential race. The voting apparatus of those states are run in all cases by Democrats,’ he said.

In fact Arizona and Georgia – two critical states that are still counting ballots – have Republican governors; Nevada’s secretary of state is a Democrat and Pennsylvania’s rules on counting were set by its Republican legislature.

He pointed to his campaign’s lawsuits, which have alleged voter fraud but offered no proof of the allegations. Two were thrown out by judges Thursday, one claiming fraud for lack of any evidence.

‘There’s tremendous litigation going on and this is a case where they’re trying to steal an election. They’re trying to rig an election and we can’t let that happen,’ he said. 

The blizzard of litigation he promised had been beset throughout the day by problems.

In Georgia, superior court judge James Bass said there was ‘no evidence’ to the Trump suit’s claims that a 53 ballots arrived late and got mixed with other ballots. 

In Michigan, Judge Cynthia Stephens ruled against the Trump campaign’s push to stop the count in order to gain additional access for its observers. ‘I have no basis to find that there is a substantial likelihood of success on the merits,’ she said.  

In Nevada, he sent Ric Grenell, his former acting director of national intelligence to announce legal claims that out of state residents had been voting.

But the press conference went badly wrong when Grenell refused to say what his name was and was laughed at by reporters then chased into a van refusing to answer questions on what evidence he had.

In Pennsylvania, the campaign claimed they were ‘banned’ from watching poll counters in Philadelphia and are now suing in federal court. 

And Jared Kushner was reported to be looking for a ‘James Baker’ figure to lead the litigation – hardly a vote of confidence in Rudy Giuliani who had been its public face for the last 48 hours.

Don Jr. headed to Georgia after tweeting a demand for ‘total war,’ and retweeting an appeal from a Trump supporter for a mass protest in Detroit against the count. Many of his tweets were flagged by Twitter.

Before he spoke Trump has responded to Biden’s leads in Arizona and Nevada and his gains in Pennsylvania and Georgia on Twitter, often all in capitals. Several Tweets have been flagged by Twitter as misinformation. 

Biden did not mention Trump’s name Thursday.

But he did make a comment that was clearly aimed at Trump and his campaign team’s legal efforts to stall vote-counting and rhetorical efforts to call into question the legitimacy of the election.

‘In America, the vote is sacred. It’s how people of this nation express their will. And it is the will of the voters, no one, not anything else, that chooses the president of the United States of America,’ Biden said. ‘So each ballot must be counted.’

Earlier Thursday, Biden was at the Queen to participate in a COVID-19 and also an economic briefing. He also made an appearance at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware Wednesday, where he again told Americans they needed to wait – but that he would win.

The appearance in Delaware was clearly intended to cast Biden as presidential and paint a contrast to Trump.

The plea for calm also spoke to increasing concerns about public order.

In Michigan, Arizona and Nevada, Trump supporters, some of them armed have descended on counting locations.

And in New York there were arrests Wednesday after a pro-Biden ‘count every vote’ protest descended into violence. 

The president had launched a furious tweet demanding that the count be stopped early Thursday morning then said his campaign would sue in any state where Joe Biden had already been declared a winner. The election outcome now hinges on five states: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

Nevada, Arizona and Georgia had expected to finish their counts Thursday but then changed expectations. 

The extraordinary focus on the counting in individual states is unprecedented.  

The wafer-thin margins in each state mean that every ballot now counts to the result. In a normal year, the states’ results would have been called quickly by television networks and the Associated Press and the count gone on quietly in the background.

But this time, with unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots fueling a record turnout, the calls were not made and instead it is official counts which regularly take days or even weeks to be completed, certified and declared which have become the focus of public attention.  

Nevada’s six electoral votes would put Biden exactly at 270 in the AP’s count – handing him the presidency. 

Nevada released another tranche of votes Thursday that expanded Biden’s lead to 12,000. 

Georgia also released additional votes counts that resulted in Trump’s lead going down to about 13,500 votes. 

The state has about 50,000 absentee ballots left to be counted – along with provisional ballots, military ballots, and votes from Americans living overseas.

Trump, with 214 electoral votes, faces a much higher hurdle to 270. He would need to win all four remaining battleground states: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada. 

The Trump campaign expressed confidence the president will get a second term in the White House.

‘By end of tomorrow – Friday – it will be clear that President Trump and Vice President Pence will serve another term in the White House,’ campaign senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters in a press call on Thursday morning. 

The Biden campaign expressed similar confidence.

‘Our data shows that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States,’ Dillon said. 

As the count dragged on, Trump expressed confidence he will win the election but said his campaign will sue in the battleground states Joe Biden won, a sign his team is not confident the vote tallies will come out in his favor.

‘All of the recent Biden claimed States will be legally challenged by us for Voter Fraud and State Election Fraud. Plenty of proof – just check out the Media. WE WILL WIN! America First!,’ Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning. Additionally, Trump has demanded the nation stop counting votes in the presidential election. 

Why the deciding votes are taking SO long to count: Sluggish tallying of mail-ins, fixing ballots one-by-one, ink shortages and printer errors have drawn out the process for days as America and the world wait

As Americans sit on tenterhooks waiting for five key states to finally crown a victor in the presidential election, one question is on everyone’s minds: What is taking so long? 

Election officials in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina have pleaded for patience as they continue chipping away at mountains of hundreds of thousands of uncounted ballots.  

The paramount reason tallying has been sluggish is because of a record number of mail-in ballots, which take significantly more time to process than in-person ballots because they have to be verified and scanned via a system with multiple steps where things can, and have, gone awry.  

Voting centers around the US have reported issues with ink shortages, ballots printed on the wrong paper and faulty machinery – exacerbating an already arduous process. 

The states that still haven’t been called as of Thursday are facing yet another challenge: Unprecedented pressure to make sure the results are right when the margin is razor-thin. 

President Donald Trump on Thursday promised to mount legal battles in all battleground states won by his rival Joe Biden as he continued issuing fevered demands to stop counting in states that haven’t been called yet. 

Trump and Republicans have been waging a war against mail-in ballots for months, charging that they would lead to widespread voter fraud. 

Now that mail-in ballots have led to delays, Republicans are arguing that the counting process is stacked against them as well – even in states where their own party makes the rules.  

Meanwhile Biden and the Democrats have urged Americans to be patient and insisted that every vote be counted, especially since they expect the bulk of mail-in ballots to go in their favor.  

With the eyes of the nation blaring down at them, election officials in the states still up for grabs are doing just that, making sure results are bulletproof in preparation for legal action by the Trump campaign. 

The states still counting as of Thursday afternoon:

• Pennsylvania (20
•  Arizona (11) 
•  Nevada (6)
•  Georgia (16)
•  North Carolina (15)

Not knowing the winner of the presidential election two days after the polls closed is understandably unsettling for Americans, who are used to seeing a result the night of. 

But in fact the counting process has always taken several days or weeks, continuing well after media outlets project the winner based on partial counts. 

Each state has its own certification deadline to hand down an official count, ranging from two days after the election in Delaware to more than a month after in California.

Why mail-in ballots take so long to count

Experts have been predicting for months that counting votes would take much longer than in previous years because of an unprecedented number of voters sending ballots by mail due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Absentee ballots are considerably more time-consuming to process than in-person ballots. 

When you vote in person, the ballot typically goes straight into the machine, where it is processed and counted almost immediately. 

There are a couple more steps with mail-in ballots. The first step is processing, which in most states sees an election worker verify the signature on the exterior of the envelope against voter rolls. 

A worker then takes time to carefully open the envelope and flatten out the ballot before it can be scanned into a system – a simple yet lengthy process in large numbers – at which point it is counted.  

Technical snags and snafus in several jurisdictions across the US slowed the process further this week.

In Georgia, for example, a burst pipe caused delays in counting up to 60,000 absentee ballots in Fulton County, which includes part of Atlanta and leans Democrat. 

In another Georgia county, there was a corrupt memory card on one scanner which meant 400 had to be recounted. Officials in some counties are also using paper ballots for the first time in 20 years because they voted earlier this year that machine voting was not secretive enough.  

And in Wisconsin, absentee ballot results in and around Green Bay, a Democratic stronghold, were delayed after vote-counting machines ran out of ink and a batch of more than 60,000 ballots had to be reprinted.

While some states were able to get ahead by counting mail-in votes as they came in over the past two months, officials in three Midwestern battlegrounds – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – were not allowed to begin counting mail-in votes until on or just before Election Day.  

Republican-led state legislatures in those three states had opposed changing laws to allow earlier preparations as other states did. 

States can predict how many mail-in ballots they will receive based on how many requests were made, however that does not account for people who changed their minds and voted in person instead or who failed to mail their ballots by November 3.

Where the count process stands

Pennsylvania

As of Thursday afternoon Pennsylvania has by far the most ballots left to count, with an estimated 956,000. 

The state, which has 20 electoral votes, is also continuing to accept ballots through 5pm Friday, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. 

Republicans had challenged that late deadline prior to Election Day, but it remained in place after the US Supreme Court declined to take up the case. 

However, the justices have said they may reconsider the case afterward—meaning that any ballots received after Election Day could be tossed out, complicating matters further. 

Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar on Thursday said that election workers could finish tallying ‘the overwhelming majority’ of the uncounted ballots to have a clear winner by the end of the day.  

Boockvar has asked counties to separate any ballots arriving between 8pm on November 3 and 5pm on November 6 in preparation for a legal challenge from the Trump campaign. 

However, Boockvar told CNN that she believes post-Election Day ballot numbers will only have a marginal impact on the outcome. 

‘It’s not a huge number,’ she said. ‘So, I think, no matter what happens, I don’t think it’s going to be a tremendous impact on this race.’ 

The majority of the outstanding ballots in Pennsylvania are from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, which tend to lean Democrat.    

Counting stopped then restarted in Philadelphia as Trump’s campaign sued claiming they are not being allowed to watch the count, winning their case first, then lost on appeal on Thursday. And in Pittsburgh, 35,000 votes cannot be legally counted until Friday. 

Arizona

Arizona was expected to hand down a result on Thursday morning, before Secretary of State Katie Hobbs announced further delays. 

Hobbs said there are about 450,000 ballots waiting to be counted across the state, with the majority – 300,000 – coming from Maricopa County, where pro-Trump protesters stormed an election office on Wednesday night.  

Maricopa County added 62,000 votes to its tally on Thursday morning, putting Biden ahead by 68,400 votes, or less than three points. 

Like Maricopa County, the other counties with outstanding votes – Pima, Cococino and Santa Cruz – are considered Democratic areas.  

The AP and other outlets declared Biden the winner in Arizona on Tuesday night but the vote count is still being closely monitored. 

Meanwhile the Trump campaign has said it is confident about winning the state.  

Speaking on Thursday morning, Hobbs did not offer an estimate for how long it will be before an outcome is reached, but experts anticipate it could arrive by Friday.   

Arizona did not accept any mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day. 

Georgia 

Georgia currently has nearly 48,000 mail-in ballots waiting to be counted, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. 

The majority of the uncounted ballots – 17,000 – are in Chatham County, which includes Savannah.  

Georgia’s Voting System Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling said on Thursday that the state is still working to determine how many provisional ballots have yet to be counted. He said he hoped they would have a number by the end of the day.  

‘Fast is great, and we appreciate fast,’ Sterling said. ‘We more appreciate accuracy.’

Asked why everything is taking so long, Sterling said there was nothing suspicious or strange about the process, but that elections were never normally so close so it doesn’t always have to come down to an official count.

Trump and the Georgia Republican Party have filed a lawsuit against election officials in Chatham County on Wednesday, asking a judge to order all late ballots be secured and accounted for.

It was filed after a Republican observer claims to have witnessed mail-in ballots which arrived after the 7pm deadline added to a pile of lawful votes to be counted.

Sean Pumphry, a registered GOP poll-watcher, said he saw 53 unprocessed ballots added to processed ones.

But Chatham County Judge James Bass dismissed Trump’s lawsuit on Thursday morning after county officials provided evidence to prove all ballots were legitimate and late ballots were not being accepted. 

Nevada

Nevada officials have estimated that around 100,000  have yet to be counted, although that number is shaky because the state mailed ballots to all active registered voters. 

The state, which has seen nearly half of its 1.2 million total votes come in by mail, will accept ballots through November 10.  

Updated results released on Thursday afternoon showed Biden’s lead has grown to nearly 12,000 votes, with 76 percent of expected votes counted. 

The majority of the outstanding votes are in Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas and more than 70 percent of the state’s voters. 

Clark County officials have said they hope to conclude counting by the end of the weekend.  

Washoe County, the state’s second largest county, had about 9,000 mail-in ballots waiting to be counted as of midday Thursday. 

The Trump campaign mounted a legal battle in Nevada on Thursday, claiming that ‘tens of thousands’ of people who voted in the state are no longer residents there.  

North Carolina 

Like Pennsylvania and Nevada, North Carolina extended its deadline to accept ballots postmarked on Election Day until November 12. 

Election officials in the state, which saw a record 4.5 million absentee ballots cast ahead of Election Day, have said new results will likely not be released until next week, when the final ballots arrive. 

There are currently about 116,000 outstanding requested absentee ballots, officials said, however it’s unclear how many of those will actually be returned.  

‘With very few exceptions, North Carolina’s numbers are not going to move until November 12 or 13,’ State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said Wednesday.

Trump holds a one point lead in the state, with 94 percent of the expected vote in, according to the AP.