Joe Biden urged calm across the US on Thursday night as he held on to a lead against Donald Trump that brought the Democratic challenger tantalisingly close to the presidency – even as votes were still being counted in a handful of critical states.
Facing possible defeat after one term, Trump from the White House appeared to dig in for a long fight, falsely claiming: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.
“If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking at them very strongly, a lot of votes came in late,” he said, in a tone that seemed calculated to inflame divisions. There was no evidence that illegal or late votes were being counted, nor that the election was being stolen.
Trump went on to rail against “historic election interference from big media, big money and big tech … The pollsters got it knowingly wrong.”
Biden and his running mate, the California senator Kamala Harris, on the other hand had emerged in Biden’s home state of Delaware, telling the country that “each ballot must be counted.
“In America, the vote is sacred,” Biden said. “Democracy is sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience, as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.”
Biden noted he and Harris “continue to feel very good” about the ultimate result of the race. “We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be declared the winners,” Biden said.
As the country remained on edge, awaiting the declaration of a victory almost 48 hours after the polls had closed and as sporadic protests have broken out in places such as Arizona, Michigan, Portland and New York, Biden said: “I ask everyone to stay calm.”
While many high-profile Republicans have not commented on Trump’s latest falsehoods, several GOP lawmakers denounced his baseless allegations about fraud, with Paul Mitchell, a Michigan congressman, saying that every vote would be counted, adding that “anything less harms the integrity of our elections and is dangerous for our democracy”. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois GOP congressman, tweeted: “STOP Spreading debunked misinformation… This is getting insane.”
Three major TV networks also cut away from the president’s live remarks due to the avalanche of lies, with news anchors saying it was “dangerous” to air his “absolutely untrue” statements.
The White House was set to be decided by razor-thin margins in five battleground states. Trump was still holding on to leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia but Biden was rapidly narrowing the gap in the two states as a backlog of postal ballots was counted. A win in Pennsylvania alone, with its 20 votes in the electoral college, would be enough to make Biden president.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
