As Joe Biden amassed small but stable leads in critical states that edged him closer on Wednesday to winning the presidency, President Trump and Republicans threatened legal challenges as they sought to shift the battle for the White House from the ballot box to the courts, The Washington Post reported.
The knife-edge US presidential race tilted toward Democrat Joe Biden early Thursday, with wins in Michigan and Wisconsin bringing him close to a majority, but President Donald Trump claimed he was being cheated and went to court to try and stop vote counting.
Tallying of votes continued through a second night in the remaining battleground states where huge turnout and a mountain of mail-in ballots sent by voters trying to avoid exposure to the coronavirus made the job all the harder.
Both candidates still had paths to winning the White House by hitting the magic majority threshold of 270 of the electoral votes awarded to whichever candidate wins the popular vote in a given state.
But momentum moved to Joe Biden, who made a televised speech from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware to say that "when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners."
By flipping the northern battlegrounds of Michigan and Wisconsin, and also winning formerly pro-Trump Arizona, Biden reached 264 electoral votes against 214 so far for Trump.
To reach 270 he was hoping next to add the six electoral votes from Nevada, where he had a small and shrinking lead, or, even better, the larger prizes of hard-fought Georgia or Pennsylvania.
More than 100 million Americans cast their ballots in advance of Tuesday's Election Day, according to the US Elections Project watchdog, a record figure largely attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, reported news agency AFP.