America’s next president hinges on the votes of four battleground states where the bulk of ballots have been counted but the race still remains too close to call.
A candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win, with victory in each state awarding a certain number of votes. Based on current counts, Biden has at least 253 with Trump behind on 214.
Early Friday morning, Biden took the lead from Trump in the deep-red state of Georgia by around 1,100 votes as mail-in ballots were counted. Georgia is worth 16 electoral college votes.
Then, the Democrat took the lead in Pennsylvania by more than 5,000 votes. The state is worth 20 electoral college votes, meaning that – if he wins here – he can afford to lose every other state still in contention, and still be named president.
Biden is expected to extend his lead in both states as the remaining votes are counted, leaving him on the cusp of victory, but both races are still too close to call definitively.
Hundreds of miles to the west, Biden was also holding on to a narrow lead in Nevada, worth six electoral college votes. He is ahead by some 11,000 votes.
Biden is also holding a narrow lead in Arizona, by some 46,000 votes. Trump had been gaining on him, providing a sliver of hope for his reelection bid, but the result may not matter now if Biden holds on elsewhere.
Scroll below to drill down into the toss-up states where it is all to play for.
Georgia – 16 electoral college votes
Result expected Friday, approx. 11,000 votes to count
49.4% BIDEN – 2,449,582
49.4% TRUMP – 2,448,485
Biden leads by 1,097 with 99% of votes counted
Joe Biden and Donald Trump are now neck and neck in Georgia, with the Democratic nominee ahead by only 1,097 votes early Friday morning.
Biden is ahead by an ultra-thin margin, after ballots trickled in from Clayton County, which is largely Democratic.
The latest figures puts both candidates in equal standing in terms of percentage points with each currently holding 49.4 per cent of the state vote.
There are now 10,000 votes that remain uncounted in the state across seven counties, in addition to the 8,900 overseas and military ballots that are due at 5pm.
At the moment there’s still no telling which way Georgia will swing as 4,800 votes are still up for grabs in Gwinnett County, the state’s second most populous county, where Hillary Clinton in 2016 became the first Democrat to win since 1976.
There are also about 1,145 ballots left count in Forsyth County, which is primarily Republican, 1,797 in Laurens County, 700 in Cobb, 444, in Floyd, and 456 in Taylor.
Trump’s standing in Georgia has swiftly weakened in the last 24 hours, having been up 9,000 votes on Thursday morning and 18,000 on Wednesday night.
President Trump and the Georgia Republican Party filed a lawsuit against election officials in Chatham County, asking a judge to order all late ballots be secured and accounted for.
It was filed after a Republican observer claims to have witnessed mail-in ballots which arrived after the 7pm deadline added to a pile of lawful votes to be counted.
Sean Pumphry, a registered GOP poll-watcher, said he saw 53 unprocessed ballots added to processed ones.
Superior Court judge James Bass said there was ‘no evidence’ to the Trump suit’s claims that a 53 ballots arrived late and got mixed with other ballots.
Pennsylvania – 20 electoral college votes
Result expected Friday, approx. 140,000 votes to count
49.2% BIDEN – 3,295,304
49.6% TRUMP – 3,289,717
Biden leads by 5,587 with 97% of votes counted
Joe Biden took the lead in Pennsylvania on Friday morning as some 30,000 votes were added to the tally, overhauling Trump’s lead of 18,000 votes and leaving the Democrat on the cusp of election victory.
The state will award the victor 20 electoral college votes – the largest of any left in contention – and would be enough to see Biden home even if he loses every other state that has yet to call a winner.
Trump, who held a 675,000-vote lead early Wednesday, prematurely declared victory in the state, which holds 20 electoral college votes. Trump leads the voting with 49.56 per cent of the vote, compared to Biden’s 49.29 per cent.
‘We’re winning Pennsylvania by a tremendous amount. We’re up 690,000 votes in Pennsylvania. These aren’t even close. It’s not like, ‘Oh, it’s close,’ Trump said during an appearance at the White House.
But by early Friday morning, had slipped to about 18,229 votes, according to CNN as mail in ballots from across the state continued to be counted, including some that were being counted by hand. The late counted ballots were overwhelming in Biden’s favor.
There’s a possibility the race won’t be decided for days and according to MSNBC, there are about 140,000 ballots left to count. If there is less than a half percentage point difference between Biden and Trump’s vote total, state law dictates that a recount must be held.
Democrats had long considered Pennsylvania a part of their ‘blue wall’ — a trifecta that also includes Wisconsin and Michigan — that for years had served as a bulwark in presidential elections. In 2016, Trump won each by less than a percentage point.
Biden, who was born in Scranton, claims favorite-son status in the state and has long played up the idea that he was Pennsylvania’s ‘third senator’ during his decades representing neighboring Delaware. He’s also campaigned extensively in the state from his home in Delaware.
If Biden wins Pennsylvania, he wins the election. Currently, he has 264 votes – including Arizona despite that coming slightly back into play. Even without Arizona, if he won Pennsylvania, he would take the White House.
Trump cannot win on Pennsylvania alone; with 214 electoral college votes, he’d still need to pick up either Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona or Nevada – the four other states where a result is yet to be officially confirmed.
Nevada – 6 electoral college votes
Result expected Friday, approx. 50,000 votes to count
49.4% BIDEN – 604,251
48.5% TRUMP – 592,813
Biden leads by 11,438 with 84% of votes counted
Biden is now leading in Nevada by more than 11,000 votes as President Donald Trump‘s campaign filed a federal lawsuit in the state, alleging that ineligible votes were cast in the Las Vegas area.
About 75 per cent of the Nevada votes are in and Biden is leading by 11,438 votes, which is only about 1 per cent, as of Thursday night.
But there are outstanding about 50,000 ballots left to be counted in the coming days. Under state law, they can still be accepted so long as they were postmarked by the November 3.
Trump narrowly lost Nevada in 2016 as the state has trended toward the Democrats in the past decade. The last Republican presidential contender to win the state was George W. Bush in 2004.
Nevada has delayed giving its election result, saying they need until at least today to count the remaining votes, as the country and the world wait in agony to find out who the next president will be.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign’s complaint filed in US District Court resurrected an effort abandoned just hours earlier in Nevada state court — a court order to stop the Clark County Registrar of Voters from using an optical scanning machine to process ballots and validate voter signatures.
The federal filing cites experiences of a woman who said Thursday she was turned away from voting in person because a mailed ballot had been cast with her signature and a political strategist TV commentator who said he was denied an opportunity to observe ballot counting late on election night.
Trump Nevada campaign co-chairman Adam Laxalt said the new filing ‘highlights ongoing voter fraud and voter disenfranchisement in Clark County’.
State Attorney General Aaron Ford called it ‘a Hail Mary’ and ‘another opportunity to undermine the confidence in this election’ while ballots are still being counted.
Ford noted a federal judge dismissed in September an effort to block the state law that let mailed ballots go out to each of Nevada’s more than 1.7 million active registered voters.
‘When they can’t stop you from voting, they try to stop your vote from counting,’ he said.
If Biden claims Nevada today, he will win another 6 electoral college points, giving him 270 when factoring in the 11 that come from Arizona.
Arizona – 11 electoral college votes
Result expected Friday, approx. 240,000 votes to count
50.06% BIDEN – 1,528,319
48.54% TRUMP – 1,482,062
Biden leads by 46,257 with 90% of votes counted
Biden’s lead in Arizona has dropped to less than 47,000 votes after Donald Trump narrowed the gap following a dump of mail-in ballots on Thursday night.
Biden remains ahead but only by 46,257, or 50.1 per cent, compared to Trump’s 48.5 per cent, after the president secured the majority vote in the state’s most populous county of Maricopa, which makes up 60 per cent of the total vote.
The latest figures means Biden now leads by 1.5 percentage points, down from 2.4 points Thursday morning.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said there are 240,000 ballots that still need to be counted statewide, with 200,000 of those in Maricopa County, home to the state capital of Phoenix. Officials are expected to update the count by 11am Friday.
It comes after the AP and and Fox News had both called Arizona early on Wednesday morning, claiming there was no possible way for Trump to claw it back from him – a move which was later called into question.
Arizona holds 11 crucial electoral college votes which, when giving them to Biden now, poises him for the White House with 264 of the 270 that he needs. He would only need to win Nevada, Georgia, or North Carolina to claim victory if his Arizona lead holds.
Arizona has a long political history of voting Republican. It’s the home state of Barry Goldwater, a five-term, conservative senator who was the Republican nominee for president in 1964.
John McCain, the party’s 2008 presidential nominee, represented the state in Congress from 1983 until his 2018 death.
But changing demographics, including a fast-growing Latino population and a boom of new residents – some fleeing the skyrocketing cost of living in neighboring California – have made the state friendlier to Democrats.
AP already called the result for Biden, but the race is tightening