Joe Biden has said he had no doubt he would defeat Donald Trump to win the US presidency as he asked everyone to stay calm as votes were counted.
The Democrat nominee said on Thursday: “We continue to feel very good about where things stand. And we have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be the winners. So, I ask people to stay calm.”
He added “democracy is sometimes messy” and “sometimes requires some patience too”.
Bidden’s brief remarks came as he crept nearer to victory over Donald Trump on Thursday in a close US election that hinged on razor-thin margins in a handful of states.
Meanwhile, the Republican president escalated his legal efforts to influence vote counting and made fresh unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud.
Biden, the former U.S. vice president, was chipping away at Trump’s leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia while retaining slim margins in Nevada and Arizona.
Ballot tabulation dragged on in those battleground states two days after polls closed, while protesters from both sides staged demonstrations in major cities over the vote counting.
After an acrimonious campaign waged during the coronavirus pandemic, the election appeared to be moving toward a nail-biting conclusion in the coming hours and perhaps days.
There is still a narrow path for Trump to win if he holds on in Georgia, where he leads by 12,800 votes, and Pennsylvania, where he is ahead by 108,600 votes, and overtakes Biden in Arizona, where he trails by 68,100 votes, or Nevada, where he is 11,400 votes behind.
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.
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”.
Trump said all of the recent “Biden claimed states” will be legally challenged for “voter fraud and state election fraud”, although he did not expand on his evidence for those claims.
“WE WILL WIN,” he added “America First!”.
Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said the president “knows he is losing” and had chosen to “push a flailing strategy, designed to prevent people’s votes from being counted”.
She said: “What we’re seeing on these legal suits are that they are meritless and nothing more than an attempt to distract and delay what is now inevitable – Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States.”