Joe Biden has taken the lead in Pennsylvania with over 5,000 votes, and is now poised for White House victory, leading in all four of the remaining swing states, despite Trump’s refusal to accept defeat and claiming he is the victim of an elaborate conspiracy.
The remaining votes in Pennsylvania – which holds 20 electoral college votes – are mostly in Biden’s strongholds of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania.
There are around 140,000 left to count.
According to Daily Mail reports, Biden now leads in Pennsylvania by 0.1% of the vote.
He is also leading in Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, the remaining swing states that are to be called.
In Georgia, the latest figures puts both candidates in equal standing in terms of percentage points with each currently holding 49.4 per cent of the state vote.
There are now fewer than 10,000 votes that remain uncounted in the state across seven counties, in addition to any overseas and military ballots that are due at 5pm. As many as 8,889 of those could come in. Biden’s lead is less than 1 percent.
Despite being able to count more than 5million votes since the polls closed on Tuesday night, there has been an agonizing delay in the final tens of thousands in the key swing states cross the country.
Poll officials have no real answer for why it is taking so long. They said on Friday morning that ‘hopefully’ a final result would come today.
If Biden takes Georgia, then he only needs to hold his lead in either Nevada or Arizona to be declared the winner. Results in both states are expected later today.
If Trump loses Georgia, he has no path to victory. The best he can do is to tie with Biden, but would need to claim victory in every state remaining in play.
Biden is also narrowing Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania, reduced from 600,000 on election day to a little over 18,000 in the early hours of Friday with around 140,000 ballots left to count. An update from the state is expected in the next few hours.
Despite the grim outlook, Trump is unlikely to concede amid a slew of legal action by his campaign and unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud.
Trump renewed those attacks on Thursday night in his first TV appearance since election day itself, where he called the entire presidential election into question, claiming it was rigged against him from start to finish by a vast conspiracy.
In his 17-minute tirade he claimed he was the victim of ‘big media, big money and big tech’ coming together to commit ‘historic election interference’ to give Joe Biden the presidency.
He claimed that if all ‘legal votes’ were counted he would win the election as he charged Democrats with trying to steal the contest ‘corruptly’ through mail-in ballots in a suddenly-announced White House address delivered as his tiny voting leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia slipped further.
All three broadcast networks – 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’, but Fox News and CNN covered it in full.
In a series of tweets sent at 2.30am Washington time, 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.
Joe Biden remained narrow favorite to win the presidency on Friday, with results in a number of key swing states expected before the end of the day.
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.
