The Republican National Committee has reached out to donors as it seeks to raise at least $60 million to fund legal challenges brought by President Donald Trump over the results of the US presidential election, two sources familiar with the matter said. The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in several states following the Nov 3 election pitting the president against Democrat Joe Biden.
Democrat Joe Biden took the lead in key battleground state Pennsylvania on Friday, where a victory for the former vice president would push him past the threshold of electoral votes needed to win the White House, official data showed.
US President Donald Trump erupted in a tirade of unsubstantiated claims that he has been cheated out of winning the US election as vote counting across battleground states early Friday showed Democrat Joe Biden steadily closing in on victory.
"They are trying to steal the election," an increasingly isolated Trump said in an extraordinary appearance at the White House on Thursday, two days after polls closed.
According to Trump, Democrats were using "illegal votes" to "steal the election from us."
Joe Biden, 77, was just one or at most two battleground states away from securing the majority to take the White House. Donald Trump, 74, needed an increasingly unlikely combination of wins in multiple states to stay in power.
Biden, who has promised to heal a country bruised by Trump's extraordinarily polarizing four years in power, appealed for "people to stay calm."
"We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator (Kamala) Harris and I will be declared the winners," he said in comments to reporters in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
"The process is working," he said. "The count is being completed. And we will know soon."
The big shift to postal ballots this year reflected the desire of voters to avoid risking exposure to Covid-19 in crowded polling stations during a pandemic that has already killed some 235,000 Americans.
Here are the Highlights on US Presidential Election Results 2020:
The Republicans' request to immediately halt the counting of ballots arriving after Election Day in Pennsylvania has been turned down by the Supreme Court. US Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, referring the challenge to the full court for a ruling on Saturday, ordered Pennsylvania in the meantime to continue keeping the late-arriving ballots separate, affirming a decision already made by the state's top elections official, news agency AFP reported.
Donald Trump kept up his attack as counting for the US elections entered the fourth day, quoting an American lawyer - Matthew Whitaker - in a tweet. "We need an explanation as to how these numbers have been running up for the last two or three days." Matthew Whitaker"- the tweet read.
Coronavirus will remain a key challenge for the next president of the United States. The United States has set a third straight daily record for new Covid-19 infections, notching more than 127,000 cases, John Hopkins University reported Friday, news agency AFP reported.As of Friday evening, the US -- the worst hit country in the world in terms of deaths and total cases -- had more than 236,000 coronavirus-related fatalities and 9.7 million known infections.
US President Donald Trump on Friday (local time) warned that legal proceedings were "just beginning", and also said that his Democratic rival Joe Biden should not "wrongfully claim" the President's office.
I had such a big lead in all of these states late into election night, only to see the leads miraculously disappear as the days went by. Perhaps these leads will return as our legal proceedings move forward!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2020
With neither incumbent President Donald Trump nor his opponent Joe Biden yet receiving a clear majority in the US Elections, renowned sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik highlighted the dilemma of millions who are waiting eagerly for the final result on Friday.
Trump says Biden 'should not wrongfully claim' presidency, reported news agency AFP.
Joe Biden should not wrongfully claim the office of the President. I could make that claim also. Legal proceedings are just now beginning!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2020
As the counting of votes for US Presidential polls continue, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has managed to maintain a lead over President Donald Trump in four key states, reported news agency ANI. According to CNN projections as of 4 pm ET (2:30 am IST), Biden is leading in the states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona, while Trump has managed a lead in North Carolina. Biden is leading Pennsylvania by 13,641 votes, Nevada by 20,137 votes, and Arizona by 39,769 votes. His lead in Georgia has been slim, with 1,616 votes. On the other hand, Trump's lead in North Carolina is by 76,737 votes.
Before Facebook shut down a rapidly growing "Stop the Steal" Facebook Group on Thursday, the forum featured calls for members to ready their weapons should President Donald Trump lose his bid to remain in the White House, reported news agency Reuters. In disabling the group after coverage by Reuters and other news organizations, Facebook cited the forum's efforts to delegitimise the election process and "worrying calls for violence from some members". Such rhetoric was not uncommon in the run-up to the election in Facebook Groups, a key booster of engagement for the world's biggest social network, but it did not always get the same treatment. A survey of US-based Facebook Groups between September and October conducted by digital intelligence firm CounterAction at the request of Reuters found rhetoric with violent overtones in thousands of politically oriented public groups with millions of members. Variations of twenty phrases that could be associated with calls for violence, such as "lock and load" and "we need a civil war", appeared along with references to election outcomes in about 41,000 instances in US-based public Facebook Groups over the two month period. Other phrases, like "shoot them" and "kill them all", were used within public groups at least 7,345 times and 1,415 times respectively, according to CounterAction. "Hang him" appeared 8,132 times.
The Pennsylvania Republican Party asked the US Supreme Court Friday to halt the counting of late-arriving ballots in the state, as Democrat Joe Biden took a lead in the tally and was poised to defeat President Donald Trump, reported news agency AFP. If Biden wins Pennsylvania he wins the presidency. The last-ditch appeal for an emergency injunction asked the court to freeze the handling of thousands of mailed ballots -- most believed favoring Biden -- that arrived after election day on Tuesday, which Republicans say should be disqualified. The petition asks the court to order Pennsylvania election officials to sequester all the ballots received after Tuesday and take no action on them. The petition indicated that the Republican Party could ask the court to revisit a pre-election challenge to the Pennsylvania government's decision to accept late-arriving ballots.
Twitter on Friday flagged as premature posts referring to Joe Biden as "president-elect," as the vote count continued in the knife-edge US election with the Democrat leading Donald Trump in several key states, reported news agency AFP. Tweets referring to the former vice president with the victor's title and his running mate Kamala Harris as "vice president-elect" were tagged with messages saying counts were not yet final. "Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted," read a Twitter message below a post from Democratic Coalition co-founder and podcaster Scott Dworkin using the two titles for Biden and Harris. The notice came with a link to information about the status of the election. Twitter told AFP that the move was in line with its Civic Integrity Policy and in keeping with the position it has taken since the polls closed late Tuesday.
The Republican National Committee has reached out to donors as it seeks to raise at least $60 million to fund legal challenges brought by President Donald Trump over the results of the US presidential election, two sources familiar with the matter said.
A Pennsylvania court on Friday ordered election officials to set aside provisional ballots cast on Election Day by voters whose absentee or mail-in ballots were received on time.
The Republican National Committee has reached out to donors as it seeks to raise at least $60 million to fund legal challenges brought by President Donald Trump over the results of the US presidential election, two sources familiar with the matter said, reported news agency Reuters. The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in several states following the Nov 3 election pitting the president against Democrat Joe Biden.
Republican US Senator Mitt Romney said Friday it was wrong for Donald Trump -- on the verge of losing the presidency to Joe Biden -- to claim that the election was "rigged, corrupt and stolen" by Democratic rivals.
As the tortuous US presidential election appeared headed to a conclusion, Donald Trump addressed the nation Thursday and claimed without evidence that he was being robbed of a second term.
A vote recount in Georgia can not be requested before the state certifies the results on November 20, Georgia's voting system implementation manager Gabriel Sterling told reporters on Friday.
Supporters of Joe Biden danced in the streets outside a ballot-counting center in Philadelphia on Friday as the steadily growing vote tallies showed the Democratic former vice president could soon be declared winner of the US presidential election, reported news agency Reuters. In Detroit, several hundred supporters of President Donald Trump, some visibly armed with guns, raised premature chants of "We won!" outside a counting center, despite it looking increasingly unlikely that this would prove true. Philadelphia appeared to relish its turn as the center of the nation's attention, even if it was earned only by the relative slowness of its vote counting as the biggest city in the closely fought state of Pennsylvania.
Where are the missing military ballots in Georgia? What happened to them?
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2020
Wall Street's main indexes took a breather on Friday after sharp gains this week as Democrat Joe Biden edged closer to victory in a nail-biting election, while the monthly jobs report underlined the economic challenge facing America's next president, reported news agency Reuters. Biden took the lead over President Donald Trump in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Georgia, putting him on the verge of winning the White House hours after Trump falsely claimed the election was being "stolen" from him".
Republican US Senator Mitt Romney said Friday it was wrong for Donald Trump -- on the verge of losing the presidency to Joe Biden -- to claim that the election was "rigged, corrupt and stolen" by Democratic rivals, reported news agency AFP. While the president is "within his rights" to request recounts and seek investigations into alleged voting irregularities, as his supporters claim occurred, "he is wrong to say that the election was rigged, corrupt and stolen," said Romney, an occasional Trump critic. "Doing so damages the cause of freedom here and around the world, weakens the institutions that lie at the foundation of the Republic, and recklessly inflames destructive and dangerous passions."
Joe Biden will deliver an address to the nation tonight as he takes the lead in voting in key states needed to win the US presidential election, a campaign official said, reported news agency AFP. Biden -- who has stopped short of claiming victory but has been called "president-elect" by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- will speak later in the day from his home city of Wilmington, Delaware, the official said on condition of anonymity.
With the attack by the Radical Left Dems on the Republican Senate, the Presidency becomes even more important!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2020
Philadelphia police said on Friday they were investigating an alleged plot to attack the city's Pennsylvania Convention Center, where votes from the hotly contested US presidential election were being counted, reported news agency Reuters. Local police received a tip about a Hummer truck with people armed with firearms driving toward the vote counting venue late on Thursday, a Philadelphia Police spokesman said in an emailed statement. Police arrested two men and seized their firearms as well as the Hummer truck about which they had received the tip, the spokesman said, adding the probe was being conducted by the police and the FBI. "The males acknowledged that the silver Hummer was their vehicle, and an additional firearm was recovered from the inside the Hummer," the spokesman added. No injuries were reported and no further details about the alleged plot were disclosed.
Top Democrat Nancy Pelosi calls Biden "president-elect", reported news agency AFP.
In an apparent attack on popular Indian-American Republican politician Nikki Haley, Donald Trump Jr has accused that "2024 GOP hopefuls" are "sitting on the sidelines" and not speaking out against the "fraud" in counting of votes as claimed by his father and US President Donald Trump.
The US state of Georgia said Friday it will recount votes from the election in which Joe Biden has eked out a razor-thin lead over President Donald Trump, reported news agency AFP. "With a margin that small, there will be a recount in Georgia," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told reporters in Atlanta.
All it took was a Facebook page and a hashtag: As election tallies trickled in Donald Trump supporters were busy going viral, accelerating the unsubstantiated claim that Democrats were "stealing" the election under the rallying cry #StopTheSteal, reported news agency AFP. It lived just 48 hours but the page quickly racked up 350,000 members, people subscribing to the conspiracy theory the Republican president too has been touting to his 88 million Twitter followers. Trump's social media "influencers" -- his son Donald Trump Jr, or the spokesperson of the Republican party Elizabeth Harrington -- also played key roles in spreading the falsehood. And it wasn't long before the hashtag, already popular with Republicans during the 2018 midterms, translated into concrete protests.
As the world awaits the result of the US presidential election, India on Friday said the global strategic partnership between the two countries have a very strong bipartisan support in the US, suggesting that the bilateral ties will not be impacted by the poll outcome, reported news agency PTI. "We are also awaiting the election results," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said during an online media briefing while replying to questions on impact of US presidential outcome on the Indo-US ties.
Does anyone really believe that Joe Biden shattered Obama's historic 2008 numbers?
- Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 6, 2020
Does anyone really believe that he did that mostly in big cities?
C'mon man!!!
Every legally cast vote should be counted. Every illegally cast vote should not. This should not be controversial.
- Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) November 6, 2020
This is not a partisan statement - free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy. 🇺🇸
Democrat Joe Biden took the lead in key battleground state Pennsylvania on Friday, where a victory for the former vice president would push him past the threshold of electoral votes needed to win the White House, official data showed.
The US Secret Service has increased its protective bubble around Joe Biden as chances increased that he will be the next US president, the Washington Post reported Friday. The Secret Service sent an extra squad of agents to Biden's campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware as expectations rose that the Democratic candidate would be able to declare victory over President Donald Trump as early as Friday, news agency AFP said quoting a report by the Post. The Secret Service, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security, is in charge or protecting the White House and senior government officials, visiting high officials, and others. It had already deployed some agents to protect Biden around early July after he triumphed in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries. As a former vice president, Biden could have requested Secret Service protection before then, but reportedly did not. If Biden becomes president-elect, Secret Service protection is expected to ramp up to a higher level.
Turkey is ready to work with whoever wins the US election, two top Turkish officials said on Friday, despite a friendship with President Donald Trump that has helped the two countries through turbulent times, reported news agency Reuters. "Regardless of which candidate takes office in the US, we will pursue a sincere approach to improve our relations," Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said. The decades-old partnership between the NATO allies has gone through unprecedented tumult in the past five years over disagreements on Syria policy, Ankara's closer ties with Moscow, its ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean, US charges against a state-owned Turkish bank and an erosion of rights in Turkey.
The outcome of the US presidential election remained in the balance early Friday as a handful of battleground states complete their vote counts, reported news agency AFP. Democrat Joe Biden has racked up at least 253 of the 270 electoral votes that he needs, according to US network projections -- and 264 if Arizona is included, which Fox News and The Associated Press have called in his favor. Donald Trump has amassed 214 electoral votes so far, and is still in contention in several states that would afford the Republican incumbent a path to reelection. Overnight, Biden pulled ahead in the count in the southeastern state of Georgia, which has 16 electoral votes, but it remains too close to call. Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania are still up for grabs.
Amid the ongoing vote count in the US Presidential election, police have made an arrest in Philadelphia for an alleged plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night (local time), where the votes are still being counted.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Friday urged both sides in the US election to show restraint until the results were available, adding it was irresponsible to aggravate tensions, reported news agency Reuters. "America is more than a one-man show. Anyone who continues to pour oil on the fire in a situation like this is acting irresponsibly," Maas told Germany's Funke media in unusually blunt language. "Now is the time to keep a cool head until an independently determined result is available," he added in some of his first comments on the situation. Counting was continuing in the extremely close US presidential election which hinges on razor-thin margins in a handful of states.
The pastor who now holds the pulpit where slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr once preached was thrust into the national spotlight this week when Georgia officials ruled his US Senate campaign would be decided by a January runoff, reported news agency Reuters. Rev Raphael Warnock, a Black Democrat, faces an uphill battle in trying to unseat Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, a wealthy businesswoman who was appointed to the seat in the conservative-leaning state after its former occupant retired. The January 5 contest is certain to attract a great amount of money and media interest as it has the potential, along with another Senate race in the state that may also go to a runoff, of helping determine which party takes control of the US senate next year.
Democrats spent $50 million trying to win control of state legislatures in 2020, but the effort mostly failed, cementing regional power in their more conservative Republican opponents over such issues as abortion, education and criminal justice, reported news agency Reuters. The losses also mean that in most of the 29 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, Democrats will not have a say in how Congressional districts are drawn when the once-a-decade process kicks off in 2021. That will make it more difficult for voters in more liberal areas of those states to elect their party's candidates to both the House of Representatives and statehouses for another 10 years.
Supporters of President Donald Trump, some carrying guns, ramped up demonstrations on Thursday night against what he has baselessly called a rigged election, in battleground states where votes were still being counted, reported news agency Reuters. The demonstrations were largely peaceful, although Trump supporters occasionally shouted with counterprotesters. Trump says the election is being stolen but there has been no evidence of fraud. In Arizona, one of the closely contested states in the too-close-to-call race between Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, Trump and Biden supporters briefly scuffled outside the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix. Several heavily armed right-wing groups assembled on the site as election workers counted votes inside, but the protests remained mostly peaceful despite mounting tension.
US President Donald Trump lashes out at Twitter for flagging his tweets questioning the vote-counting process.
Twitter is out of control, made possible through the government gift of Section 230!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2020
I easily WIN the Presidency of the United States with LEGAL VOTES CAST. The OBSERVERS were not allowed, in any way, shape, or form, to do their job and therefore, votes accepted during this period must be determined to be ILLEGAL VOTES. U.S. Supreme Court should decide!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2020
President Donald Trump launched a tirade of unsubstantiated claims that he had been cheated out of winning the US election, as vote counting across battleground states early Friday showed Democrat Joe Biden closing in on victory, reported news agency AFP. Biden's momentum towards the White House built further with major media outlets reporting he had overtaken Trump by a razor-thin margin in the crucial battleground state of Georgia. "They are trying to steal the election," an increasingly isolated Trump said in an extraordinary appearance at the White House on Thursday, two days after polls closed.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden took a narrow lead over President Donald Trump in the battleground state of Georgia for the first time early on Friday, putting the White House within his reach as it and other undecided states continue to count ballots, reported news agency Reuters. Biden has a 253 to 214 lead in the state-by-state Electoral College vote that determines the winner, according to most major television networks. Winning Georgia's 16 electoral votes would put the former vice president on the cusp of the 270 he needs to secure the presidency. Biden, 77, would become the next president by winning Pennsylvania, or by winning two out of the trio of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.
#USElections2020 | "Difficult to predict what is going to happen in the court, in the coming weeks": Esha Sarai, Correspondent, Voice Of America on #USElectionResults pic.twitter.com/ITb5fXbQbq
- NDTV (@ndtv) November 6, 2020
Watch | Dueling protests over count outside a vote tabulation site in Philadelphia on Thursday #USElections2020 pic.twitter.com/SYq1fIFbEE
- NDTV (@ndtv) November 6, 2020
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With his re-election chances fading as more votes are counted in a handful of battleground states, US President Donald Trump launched an extraordinary assault on the country's democratic process from the White House on Thursday, falsely claiming the election was being "stolen" from him. Read more