Democratic candidate in the US presidential election Joe Biden has pulled ahead of his Republican rival President Donald Trump in Georgia and Pennsylvania, as the Americans face a nail-biting wait for the final results.
Biden’s lead in the two crucial states in the presidential race has made Trump’s reelection almost impossible.
Voting data show Biden is leading in Georgia, where there are 16 electoral-college votes, by 917, with 99 percent of the votes counted until 9am EST on Friday [8pm Bangladesh time].
The former vice president also took a 5,596-vote lead over Trump in Pennsylvania, a state of 20 electoral votes, where 98 percent of the ballots were so far counted.
According to Associate Press news agency, Biden, 77, already secured 264 electoral votes, only six less than the 270 threshold needed to win the polls. Trump, 74, has so far bagged 214.
Georgia is traditionally a Republican state and has not been won by any Democrat since 1992. It is one of a handful of states on which the election now hangs.
Apart from Georgia, counts were continuing in three states with razor-thin margins – Pennsylvania (20 electoral-college votes), Nevada (6) and North Carolina (15).
The shift in Georgia and Pennsylvania came hours after Trump appeared at the White House to claim the election was being "stolen" from him.
Georgia and Pennsylvania officials expressed optimism they would finish counting on Friday, while Arizona and Nevada were still expected to take days to complete their vote totals.
According to BBC, Trump has made unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.
Speaking from the White House on Thursday, the president said: "If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes they can try to steal the election from us."
Beyond allegations of irregularities, the Trump campaign has not been able to present any evidence of election fraud.
The president added: "We were winning in all the key locations, by a lot actually, and then our numbers started getting miraculously whittled away in secret."
"There's been a lot of shenanigans and we can't stand for that in our country," he said.
Trump fired off several tweets in the early morning hours on Friday, reiterating the complaints he aired earlier at the White House.
Twitter flagged the post as possibly misleading, something it has done to numerous posts by the president since Election Day.
Trump actively discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, while Biden urged his voters to choose mail voting, and it is these postal ballots that are now being tallied in the key states.
Reuters reports: "They're trying to rig an election, and we can't let that happen," said Trump, who spoke in the White House briefing room but took no questions. Several TV networks cut away during his remarks, with anchors saying they needed to correct his statements.
Biden, who earlier in the day urged patience as votes were counted, responded on Twitter: "No one is going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever."
Trump's incendiary remarks followed a series of Twitter posts earlier in the day in which he called for vote counting to stop, even though he currently trails Biden in enough states to hand the Democrat the presidency.
Trump's campaign, meanwhile, pursued a flurry of lawsuits in several states, though judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly rejected challenges there. Legal experts said the cases had little chance of affecting the electoral outcome, and Biden campaign senior legal adviser Bob Bauer call them part of a "broader misinformation campaign."
The close election has underscored the nation's deep political divides, and if he wins Biden could also face a difficult time governing in a deeply polarized Washington.
Republicans could keep control of the US Senate pending the outcome of four undecided Senate races, including two in Georgia, and they would likely block large parts of his legislative agenda, including expanding healthcare and fighting climate change.
And even if Biden prevails, he will have failed to deliver the sweeping repudiation to Trump that Democrats had hoped for, reflecting the deep support the president enjoys despite his tumultuous four years in office.
The winner will face a pandemic that has killed more than 234,000 people in the United States and left millions more out of work, even as the country still grapples with the aftermath of months of unrest over race relations and police brutality.
