WILMINGTON, Del./WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – Democrat Joe Biden held a narrow lead in Wisconsin today after officials completed their vote count in the pivotal state, a major boost in his quest to win the U.S. presidency from Donald Trump despite the Republican incumbent’s false claim of victory and unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud.
Biden also led in another critical Midwestern battleground state – Michigan – as he and Trump raced to get to the 270 electoral votes in the state-by-state Electoral College needed to win the White House. Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan in his 2016 election victory.
Trump’s campaign said this afternoon it had filed a lawsuit seeking to halt vote counting in Michigan and asserting that it had not been given enough access to counting sites to observe the opening of ballots. Biden was ahead by 45,000 votes out of more than 5 million ballots in Michigan.
Wisconsin officials finished their tally at around midday after an all-night effort, showing Biden with a lead of just over 20,000 votes, or 0.6%, according to Edison Research. The Trump campaign immediately said it would seek a recount, which is permitted under state law when the margin is below 1%.
A Biden victory in Wisconsin would significantly narrow Trump’s path to a second four-year term, though the outcome remained in doubt with Michigan and other closely contested states including Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina still counting votes.
Voting concluded as scheduled on Tuesday night, but many states routinely take days to finish counting ballots.
Trump led in the two Southern states, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as in Pennsylvania, where more than 1 million ballots were yet to be processed. But if Trump loses Wisconsin, he would have to win all three as well as either Arizona or Nevada, where Biden was leading in the latest vote counts.
At the moment, not including Wisconsin, Biden leads Trump 227 to 213 in Electoral College votes, which are largely based on a state’s population.
In dueling conference calls with reporters earlier on Wednesday, officials from each campaign insisted their candidate would prevail.
“If we count all legal ballots, we win,” Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said, setting the stage for the post-election litigation over ballot counting.
Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon told reporters the former vice president was on track to win the election, while senior legal adviser Bob Bauer said there were no grounds for Trump to invalidate lawfully cast ballots.
“We’re going to defend this vote, the vote by which Joe Biden has been elected to the presidency,” said Bauer, adding that the campaign’s legal team was prepared for any challenge.
Biden was expected to deliver an address later on Wednesday. The campaign also launched a new group, the Biden Fight Fund, to raise money for legal fights over the election.
Trump continued to make baseless attacks on the vote-counting process on Twitter on Wednesday, hours after he appeared at the White House and declared victory in an election that was far from decided. Both Facebook and Twitter flagged multiple posts from the president for promoting misleading claims.
“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said before launching an extraordinary attack on the electoral process by a sitting president. “This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
Trump provided no evidence to back up his claim of fraud and did not explain how he would fight the results at the Supreme Court, which does not hear direct challenges.
In the nationwide popular vote, Biden on Wednesday was comfortably ahead of Trump, with 2.6 million more votes. Trump won the 2016 election over Democrat Hillary Clinton after winning crucial battleground states even though she drew about 3 million more votes nationwide.
The election uncertainty only added to the anxiety many Americans were feeling following a vitriolic campaign that unfolded amid a pandemic that has killed more than 231,000 Americans and left millions more jobless. The country has also grappled with months of unrest involving protests over racism and police brutality.
Biden’s hopes of a decisive early victory were dashed on Tuesday evening when Trump won the battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and Texas.
Biden led in Arizona, a battleground state with a high Latino population, which would make him only the second Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in 72 years. Trump won the state in 2016.
In Pennsylvania, Trump led by nearly 3 million votes, but officials said they were slowly working their way through millions of mail-in ballots, which were seen as likely to benefit Biden. Across the state, there were about twice as many ballots left to count in counties that backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 than in the counties won that year by Trump.
Among other undecided states, Nevada does not expect to update its vote count until Thursday, state officials said.
TEAMS OF LAWYERS
It was not clear what Trump meant by saying overnight that he would ask the Supreme Court to halt “voting.” The high court does not hear direct challenges but instead reviews cases that have worked their way up from lower courts.
Trump has repeatedly said without evidence that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud, although U.S. election experts say fraud is very rare.
Legal experts have said the election outcome could get bogged down in state-by-state litigation over a host of issues, including whether states can include late-arriving ballots that were mailed by Election Day. Both campaigns have marshaled teams of lawyers in preparation for any disputes.
The Supreme Court previously allowed Pennsylvania to move forward with a plan to count ballots mailed by Election Day that arrive up to three days later, but some conservative justices suggested they would be willing to reconsider the matter. State officials planned to segregate those ballots as a precaution.
Ahead of the election, Trump had said he wanted his latest U.S. Supreme Court appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, confirmed by the Senate in case the court had to hear any electoral dispute. Democrats had criticized the president for appearing to suggest he expected Barrett to rule in his favor.
The election will also decide which party controls the U.S. Congress for the next two years, and the Democratic drive to win control of the Senate appeared to be falling short. Democrats had flipped two Republican-held seats while losing one of their own, and six other races remained undecided – Alaska, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina and two in Georgia.
Trump’s strong performance in Florida, a must-win state for his re-election, was powered by his improved numbers with Latinos.
Edison’s national exit poll showed that while Biden led Trump among nonwhite voters, Trump received a slightly higher proportion of the nonwhite votes than he did in 2016. The poll showed that about 11% of African Americans, 31% of Hispanics and 30% of Asian Americans voted for Trump, up 3 percentage points from 2016 in all three groups.
