Biden Close to Becoming New U.S. President, but Trump Threatens Legal Battle of Challenges
The re-election campaign of U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday challenged the vote count in a fourth key state, Georgia, by calling for the location and invalidation of possible late ballots.
The announcement came at a time when the count in Georgia is already over 95% and the results are very tight, so the road to the White House could depend on the 16 electoral votes that this southern state distributes.
Trump led the count on Wednesday by a margin of just 1% over Biden, a lead of about 56,000 votes, but more results were expected before the night ended.
Biden has 264 delegates in the Electoral College and is one step away from getting the 270 pledges that give the keys to the White House, compared to 214 for Trump.
The road to the White House for the Democrat is to conquer at least one of the four key states still in play: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada.
Georgia is the third key state - along with Pennsylvania and Michigan - in which the Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit to challenge some aspect of the vote count, while in another territory, Wisconsin, the president's team has called for a recount of all votes.
"We will not allow Democratic election officials to steal this election from President Trump with late-issued and illegal ballots," the "number two" in the president's re-election campaign, Justin Clark, said in a statement.
The lawsuit, filed in Chatham County, where Savannah City is located and which is Democratic-leaning, alleges that "a Republican observer observed how 53 late ballots were illegally added to a pile of mail ballots" in that county, Clark said.
To be valid, the ballots in Georgia had to arrive before 7 p.m. local time this Tuesday, Election Day, and Trump's campaign referred to that alleged incident in Savannah, for which he did not provide evidence, to claim that possibly votes received beyond that time were being counted.
The appeal filed by the campaign calls for "all counties to separate any ballots that were late from those legally cast, to ensure a free and fair election," Clark summarized.
The Republican Party planned to file similar demands in a dozen counties in Georgia.
Democratic candidate for the White House, Joe Biden, insisted Wednesday that if elected president the United States would return to the Paris climate agreement, whose withdrawal became effective today after the Donald Trump Administration decided it three years ago.
"Today the Trump Administration officially abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. And in exactly 77 days, a Biden Administration will rejoin it," the former Democratic vice president tweeted.
Biden's message included a link to a tweet from ABC News reporting that the United States had abandoned the pact on Wednesday, three years after Trump announced that the country was pulling out.
The withdrawal became effective coinciding with the recount in the U.S. elections, where it is not yet known whether Trump or Biden won.
The withdrawal from the agreement, to which the previous government of the Democrat Barack Obama had committed itself in 2015, and of which Biden was Vice President, means the end of all the commitments that the US had made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% by 2025, compared to 2005 levels.
The uncertainty about the winner of the elections leaves the door open to a Biden Administration reintegrating the country, the second most polluting on the planet, into the agreement to combat the climate crisis.
Biden had already pledged to rejoin on his first day in office, leaving the nation only about three months out of the deal.
The former vice president is close to victory after scoring the key states of Michigan and Wisconsin, according to mainstream media projections.
Biden has 264 delegates in the Electoral College and is one step away from getting the 270 pledges that give the keys to the White House, compared to the 214 that Trump has accumulated.
