US election: Joe Biden edges ahead of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania vote count

Joe Biden, flanked by vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, called for calm as the election race remained too close to call
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Michael Howie6 November 2020

Joe Biden has extended his lead over Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, leaving the Democratic candidate within touching distance of the White House.

With an estimated 96 per cent of the votes counted, Mr Biden had opened up over a 14,000 vote lead over the Republican incumbent.

Should Mr Biden win the Keystone State, he will have 273 electoral college votes – taking him past the magic 270 number needed to secure victory.

Mr Biden, 77, had trailed Mr Trump, 74, by more than half a million votes at one point in the hours after the polls closed.  

Earlier on Friday the state reported it had 50,000 mail-in votes still to tabulate.

Exit polls have shown Mr Biden has a healthy advantage among voters who decided to post their ballots early – which explains why he has been consistently chipping away at the president’s lead in Pennsylvania.  

Workers in Pennsylvania have been methodically counting around 2.6million postal ballots received this year – a vast number prompted by concern among voters about standing in long queues on election day while the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage, having infected more than 100,000 Americans in a single day this week.

Mr Biden actively encouraged supporters to cast their votes early. Mr Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly claimed that mailed-in ballots are open to widespread fraud, leading a higher proportion of his supporters to turn up on election day.

In the days since polls closed on Tuesday, Mr Trump and his surrogates have tried to halt the counting of votes in key swing states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia, citing baseless allegations of electoral fraud and filing a string of unsuccessful lawsuits.

On Thursday, as Mr Biden continued to gain ground in those states, the president unleashed a 17-minute rant from the White House briefing room repeating the claims.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,”  he said, without evidence, before unspooling a series of conspiracy theories about mail-in voting.

But on the ground, officials involved in the process remained level-headed.

“There’s still some to count,” said Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state. “So they are working incredibly hard. They are going to keep counting into the evening, and stay tuned.”

“We are going to be counting every ballot."

In razor-thin Georgia, secretary of state Brad Raffensperger said that the presidential race remains too close to call at there would be a recount.

Biden currently leads President Trump across Georgia by 1,546 votes.

Mr Raffensperger said: “The focus for our office and for the county elections officials, for now, remains on making sure that every legal vote is counted and recorded accurately.”

He added that out of about the five million votes cast, the margin will be within a "few thousand."

“With a margin that small, there will be likely a recount in Georgia,” Mr Raffensperger said.

Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system implementation manager, said there were about 4,000 outstanding ballots to be counted across a handful of counties.

Mr Sterling told reporters around 18,008 ballots from military and other citizens overseas have been accepted by the state.  

In Nevada, which has six electoral votes to offer, Biden is leading by 20,137 votes.

Biden has 49.7 per cent of the vote to Trump’s 48.1 per cent.

About 130,000 ballots are outstanding in the state, the majority of which are in Clark County, home to Las Vegas.

In Arizona, an estimated 250,000 to 270,000 ballots are left to count.

Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, said 137,000 of those were in Maricopa County.

After the release of more results later tonight, that number would go down below 100,000 ballots.

Mrs Hobbs told CNN: "They have told us they expect to be counting through the weekend and should have pretty much everything except for provisional ballots wrapped up this weekend."

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