Joe Biden 6 short of 270, Trump looks for legal options (Video)
Thursday, 5 November 2020 (11:40 IST)
Democrat Joe Biden has won the state of Michigan, leaving him six votes shy of the 270 needed to declare victory. Both sides are preparing for a potential legal battle. Follow the latest with DW.Polls have closed across the US, but vote-counting could take some time due to the unprecedented number people who cast their ballots early.
Donald Trump has won Florida, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Wyoming, West Virginia, South Carolina, Idaho, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa and Montana.
Joe Biden has sealed Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, Arizona, Hawaii, Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico, California, New Hampshire, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Illinois, Delaware and Connecticut, as well as the District of Columbia.
Five states still need to be called, with millions of votes uncounted.
Biden is six electoral votes away from reaching the 270 needed to reach the White House.
04:13 Protests broke out across the country with groups demanding that the count either be stopped or completed, according to reporting by The New York Times. Trump supporters in Phoenix, Arizona, taking a cue from earlier protests in Detroit, Michigan, gathered outside a ballot counting center demanding the vote count cease. They repeated Trump's unsubstantiated allegation that Democrats were committing election fraud.
On the other side of the aisle, protesters in New York, Portland, Chicago and Philadelphia took to the street in "Count Every Vote" demonstrations. Police reportedly made several arrests.
02:49 Wilmington, Delaware has been getting a lot of airtime over the last few days, not least as it is the hometown of presidential candidate Joe Biden.
DW headed for the streets of Wilmington on Wednesday to sample the atmosphere among voters with the election result still in the balance.
02:14 Joe Biden has promised to rejoin the Paris Agreement if he wins. The US officially left the international agreement on climate action on Wednesday three years after Trump's announced withdrawal. The Democratic rival tweeted that "in exactly 77 days, a Biden Administration will rejoin it."
01:49 Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has described Donald Trump's lawsuit against the state as "frivolous" while she also confirmed all votes have been counted.
Trump's campaign team has filed a lawsuit in Michigan to halt state officials from counting votes.
Team Trump said the case seeks to stop counting until it has an election inspector at each absentee voter counting board. The campaign also wanted to review ballots which were opened and counted before an inspector from its team was present.
Joe Biden earned almost 120,000 votes more than his rival in Michigan, yet Trump supporters have descended on a polling station in the state's biggest city, Detroit, chanting "Stop the count!" echoing the sentiments of the president.
01:36 OSCE election observers have not seen any irregularities during the US presidential election in Pennsylvania, Ambassador Urszula Gacek, Head of the election Observation Mission to the US, told DW. "We have come across one incident: a postal worker dumping a bag of post including ballots on their way to voters", she says, "but what is important: We have not found evidence of systemic wrongdoing in the processing of postal ballots."
But President Trump’s unfounded allegations that there have been irregularities during the presidential election to help Joe Biden win the election do concern her: "In his statements, [Trump] has undermined the voter’s confidence in the electoral process. That is a fact, we have that on record." Gacek says she is hopeful that her work will help to restore trust in the system.
01:23 The Trump campaign has mounted yet another legal challenge in Pennsylvania, claiming that the state's extension of the voter ID deadline was in violation of state law, according to a tweet by White House Correspondent Carrie Sheffield.
"Now, every vote must be counted. No one is going to take our democracy away from us — not now, not ever," said presidential candidate Joe Biden on the second day of #Election2020. pic.twitter.com/ZbxuOYuI1e
