Biden inches ahead of Trump in key state Georgia
Democratic candidate Joe Biden has pulled ahead of Donald Trump in Georgia, a key state in the US presidential race, voting data shows.
Mr Trump must win Georgia to leave him with a path to win the election.
According to the most recent data, Mr Biden is leading in the state by more than 1 000, with 99% of votes counted.
With its 16 electoral college votes, winning the state would put Mr Biden just one shy of the crucial 270 threshold needed to win the presidency. If Mr Trump does not win Georgia, the most electoral college votes he could get from the remaining states is 269, which would leave the candidates in an unprecedented draw.
Final vote counting is continuing in the state, and no news organisation has yet projected it as a Biden win.
Authorities there have said they hope to have a result on Friday.
Georgia is a traditionally Republican state and has not been won by a Democrat since 1992.
It is one of a handful of states on which the election now hangs.
Joe Biden currently has 253 electoral college votes, while Republican Mr Trump has 214. To win the White House, a candidate needs 270.
Some news organisations have a higher tally for Mr Biden, having projected a win for the Democrat in Arizona. But the BBC considers the state too early to call.
In addition to Georgia and Arizona, counts are continuing in three states with razor-thin margins — Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina. A win in just Pennsylvania, which has 20 electoral college votes, or two of the other four remaining states would be enough to confirm Mr Biden as president-elect, barring any legal challenge.
Mr Trump, meanwhile, needs to win Pennsylvania and three of the remaining four states.
Meanwhile, Trump, 74, has sought to portray as fraudulent the slow counting of mail-in ballots, which surged in popularity due to fears of exposure to the coronavirus through in-person voting. As counts from those ballots have been tallied, they have eroded the initial strong leads the president had in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.
States have historically taken time after Election Day to tally all votes.
The close election has underscored the nation’s deep political divides, and if he wins Biden will likely face a difficult task governing in a deeply polarized Washington.
Republicans could keep control of the US Senate pending the outcome of four undecided Senate races, including two in Georgia, and they would likely block large parts of his legislative agenda, including expanding healthcare and fighting climate change.
The winner will have to tackle a pandemic that has killed more than 234 000 people in the United States and left millions more out of work, even as the country still grapples with the aftermath of months of unrest over race relations and police brutality.
Trump fired off several tweets in the early morning hours on Friday, and repeated some of the complaints he aired earlier at the White House. “I easily WIN the Presidency of the United States with LEGAL VOTES CAST,” he said on Twitter, without offering any evidence that any illegal votes have been cast.
Twitter flagged the post as possibly misleading, something it has done to numerous posts by Trump since Election Day.
In an extraordinary assault on the democratic process, Trump appeared in the White House briefing room on Thursday evening and baselessly alleged the election was being “stolen” from him. Offering no evidence, Trump lambasted election workers and sharply criticized polling before the election that he said was designed to suppress the vote because it favoured Biden.
“They’re trying to rig an election, and we can’t let that happen,” said Trump, who spoke in the White House briefing room but took no questions. Several TV networks cut away during his remarks, with anchors saying they needed to correct his statements.
Biden, who earlier in the day urged patience as votes were counted, responded on Twitter: “No one is going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever.”
Trump supporters, some carrying guns, ramped up their demonstrations against the process on Thursday night. In Arizona, Trump and Biden supporters briefly scuffled outside the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix. — AFP
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