US elections – Joe Biden close to victory

Joe Biden is close to claiming the presidency from Donald Trump with a handful of states expecting to complete their vote counts despite Republicans filing cases to stop counting in at least two states.

Biden held 264 Electoral College votes out of the 270 needed to win the White House.

Biden needs only to win an additional outstanding state, such as Nevada where he is leading, or Georgia, where his campaign believes absentee votes will push him over the top.

The former vice president said he expects to prevail. “I’m not here to declare that we’ve won, but I am here to report that when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners,” he told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware.

His remarks came after he scored a victory over Trump in Wisconsin, closing off one of the president’s best routes to re-election.

Trump took to Twitter to rage about the increasing votes for Biden, and stoked rage among his most ardent supporters with the unfounded allegation that fraud kept him from winning. His campaign said it is suing in Pennsylvania and Michigan to halt vote counts that have been trending toward Biden.

The president tweeted throughout the day, casting doubt on the count of mail-in ballots, which were heavily Democratic.

“How come every time they count Mail-In ballot dumps they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction,” the president said on Twitter.

Trump won Florida, a crucial prize in the race for the White House that closed off Biden’s hopes for an early knockout. The president also won Texas, which Democrats had hoped might flip and entirely reshape the electoral map.

Trump won Ohio and Biden won Minnesota, states that each candidate had sought to take from the other but wound up politically unchanged from 2016.

Trump still holds small leads in North Carolina and Georgia, though there are votes outstanding in each. Trump won both states in 2016. But his lead in Georgia was narrowing Wednesday evening.