Politics

Biden addresses nation, stops short of claiming victory

(Update 7: Adds info, changes headline)

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nov 4 (efe-epa).- Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Wednesday afternoon said that he believes he will win the election during a speech at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware.

“I’m not here to declare that we’ve won, but I am here to report that when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners,” said Biden, who at this hour holds a 264-214 lead over President Donald Trump in the prospective electoral vote count, according to projections by the major US media outlets.

Although Trump had said early Wednesday morning that vote counting should be halted, particularly in certain states he needs to ensure his reelection, Biden responded by saying in his brief speech: “No one’s going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever,” adding that “every vote must be counted.”

“Here, the people rule,” he said. “Power can’t be taken or asserted. It flows from the people. And it’s their will that determines who will be the president of the United States, and their will alone.”

“My friends, I’m confident we’ll emerge victorious,” Biden said. “But this will not be my victory alone or our victory alone. It will be a victory for the American people, for our democracy, for America. And there will be no blue states and red states when we win – just the United States of America.”

Within the past hour, media outlets CBS, CNN and NBC projected that Biden would win the key state of Michigan, thus expanding his margin of victory over Trump.

With the 16 votes in the Electoral College that Michigan provides, Biden now stands at a projected 264 votes in that key institution – where 270 votes are required to win the presidency – to Trump’s 214.

At this stage of the vote count, with several states not yet having reported their vote totals and the main media outlets holding off on projecting the winner in the presidential race in those states, Biden’s electoral vote total looks like this: Arizona (11), California (55), Colorado (9), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (20), Maine-state (2), Maine-District 1 (1) Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), Michigan (16), Minnesota (10), Nebraska-District 2 (1), New Jersey (14), New York (29), New Hampshire (4), New Mexico (5), Oregon (7), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Virginia (13), Washington (12) and Wisconsin (10).

Projections indicate that Trump, on the other hand, has won the following states: Alabama (9), Arkansas (6), South Carolina (9), North Dakota (3), South Dakota (3), Florida (29), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Idaho (4), Indiana (11), Iowa (6) Louisiana (8), Maine-District 2 (1), Mississippi (6), Missouri (10), Montana (3), Nebraska-state (2), Nebraska-District 1 (1), Nebraska-District 3 (1), Ohio (18), Oklahoma (7), Tennessee (11), Texas (38), Utah (6), West Virginia (5) and Wyoming (3).

The states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, Alaska and Georgia have not yet been called by the networks.

Meanwhile, Trump’s reelection campaign on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in a Michigan court demanding that the vote count in that state be halted, claiming that sufficient access to the polls had not been provided to voters.

The announcement of the lawsuit was made by Trump campaign director Bill Stepien in a statement shortly after announcing that his team will also demand a recount in Wisconsin.

“Joe Biden is on track to win this election and he will be the next president of the United States,” the former vice president’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, told reporters earlier on Wednesday after an anxiety-filled election night that ended – as many expert observers had expected – with no clear winner.

“We believe we are on a clear path to victory by this afternoon. We expect that the vice president will have leads in states that put him over 270 electoral votes,” O’Malley Dillon said.

“Let’s be extremely clear about something: If Donald Trump got his wish and we stopped counting ballots right now, Vice President Joe Biden would be the next president of the United States,” she added, referring to Trump’s earlier claim that he had won the election and wanted “all voting to stop.”

No voting is actually ongoing at this time, with all the polls having closed last night, but millions of mail-in ballots are still en route to election offices around the nation and have yet to be counted and many ballots cast in person or by mail on or before Nov. 3 have not yet been tabulated either.

O’Malley Dillon said that the campaign believes Biden has won the state of Wisconsin, but the Trump campaign announced Wednesday that it will request a recount in that state, which has a provision for an automatic recount when a candidate’s margin of victory is below a certain level.

In addition, the Biden campaign is expecting Michigan to declare on Wednesday that Biden has won that state, but the country will have to wait another day to learn the definitive results in Pennsylvania and Nevada, in the latter of which local authorities decided not to make public the results until 9 am Thursday.

The campaign chief said in her remarks that Biden would address the nation “later” on Wednesday.

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