Trump continues vote counting protest as Biden closes in on victory

Updated

Donald Trump continued to protest at votes being counted in the US presidential election with Joe Biden just one battleground state away from being able to claim victory.

President Trump has already filed legal action in several states to try to stop vote counting and repeatedly attempted to question the legitimacy of the process.

Democrat challenger Mr Biden again stressed that "every vote must be counted" as the process of tallying results following Tuesday's election continued.

After securing victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, the Democrat had 264 electoral college votes and needed to secure one of Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina or his home state Pennsylvania to reach the necessary 270 to win the White House race.

Mr Trump, however, must win all four states, and has begun legal action in three of them to either stop the counting of votes or insist his team be provided greater access to scrutinise the process.

In characteristic Twitter messages he said "STOP THE COUNT" adding "ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED" – a message which carried a warning from the social media firm about content which is "disputed and might be misleading".

Elections are run by individual state, county and local governments and Mr Trump's public comments have no impact on the tallying of votes across the country.

The Trump campaign requested a recount in Wisconsin and filed lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

On Wednesday, former vice president Mr Biden said he expected to win the presidency but stopped short of outright declaring victory.

"I will govern as an American president," Biden said. "There will be no red states and blue states when we win. Just the United States of America."

Downing Street said it was too early to speculate on the outcome of the US election, in response to questions on whether ministers were already reaching out to the Biden camp.

"What we are doing at the moment is allowing the US electoral process time to reach a conclusion," the Prime Minister's official spokesman said.

"I don't think you would expect us to speculate on the outcome at this stage.

"The US is our closest ally and we are absolutely confident that the relationship will go from strength to strength whichever candidate wins the election."

The bitterly fought election and the protracted results process have added to tensions on the streets in some American cities.

Police in Seattle and Portland arrested more than a dozen people as hundreds took to the streets to demand a full count of all presidential election votes and a halt to President Trump's court challenges.

Pro-Trump supporters have also converged on vote-counting centres in cities such as Detroit and Phoenix.

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