Biden remains in election limbo as Trump tries to sue his way to a second term

President’s team continues alleging voter fraud, but have not released any evidence as count plods on

Joe Biden remains in presidential election limbo, waiting for vote-counting in several states to wrap up as Donald Trump tries to tweet and sue his way to a second term.

The former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee remains at 264 electoral college votes, six shy of the 270 needed to become the president-elect. Vote-counters in states that are projected to eventually be awarded to him (Nevada and Pennsylvania) and one that is too close to call (Georgia) plodded along with untallied ballots – but not at paces that satisfied the Associated Press enough to declare Mr Biden the winner of any.

If Mr Biden were to win one of those states, then he will be the projected winner and Mr Trump would have just over 70 days left as the leader of the free world. But the president is not going out quietly, and there is no evidence he plans to concede any time soon.

When Mr Trump has found himself in a jam, usually in his business career, he has turned to his lawyers.

To be sure, litigation has long been a favourite tactic of the president, and he has boasted in interviews, at political rallies and even during coronavirus briefings about his history of using litigation against his business and personal foes. He has mused for years, often with a smirk, about suing his political rivals and critics. These past habits made his Friday message to his general election foe – see you in court – wholly unsurprising.

“This is about the integrity of our entire election process. From the beginning we have said that all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted, yet we have met resistance to this basic principle by Democrats at every turn,” Mr Trump claimed, but without providing examples of or evidence showing that alleged pushback, in a statement released by his campaign.

“We will pursue this process through every aspect of the law to guarantee that the American people have confidence in our government,” the president added. “I will never give up fighting for you and our nation.”

Mr Trump, with those words appeared to, for the first time publicly, acknowledge that when the counting is over, he will not defeat Mr Biden.

He and his surrogates continued to make unsupported claims of voter fraud in the swing states that are uncalled and still counting as Mr Biden pulled ahead in most. He leads (at the time of this writing) by around 40,000 votes in Arizona, about 1,500 in Georgia, 20,000 in Nevada and 13,600 in Pennsylvania. (Mr Trump was ahead by nearly 77,000 in North Carolina).

“I want every ballot that’s a legal ballot to be counted,” Trump surrogate Matt Schlapp told Fox News. “I just want to make sure that there’s not a systematic fraud process where you can’t pull out the fraudulent ballots.”

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The Trump campaign, however, has produced no evidence of widespread or even limited voter fraud. The claims have angered Democrats.

“While some, including the president, continue to spew baseless claims of fraud – claims for which his team has not produced one iota of evidence – what we have seen here in Philadelphia is democracy, pure and simple,” the city’s mayor, Jim Kenney, told reporters.

But Republicans in Nevada have asked the Justice Department to look into their claims that thousands of nonresidents were allowed to vote in the Silver State. Across the continent, Pennsylvania Republicans asked for an emergency Supreme Court order to separate mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day but before a deadline of 6 November, which officials have already been ordered to do, as vote counters continued to process ballots that could determine the fate of the presidency.

In a separate case, a federal court judge has denied a GOP request to toss out Pennsylvania ballots that had been “cured”, or contained errors that were corrected.

Republican National Committee chairperson Ronna McDaniel announced the GOP has sent lawyers to four states to investigate “irregularities”. But, like Mr Trump, she did not provide any proof, saying: “You’ll hear the evidence of this later on.” Instead, also like the president, she chose to pivot to attacking the press: “Because Biden is in a very slight lead, the media demands the race is over and there is nothing else to see here.”

But with scuttlebutt in Washington about talk in the president’s inner circle of a possible intervention to convince him to concede, the Biden campaign issued a warning.

“As we said on 19 July, the American people will decide this election,” a campaign official said. “And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”