Biden moves closer to victory

Former Democratic vice-president Joe Biden on Wednesday won the key battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin with razor-thin margins and was closing in on winning the Electoral College and the US presidency.

Winning the two states gave Biden 264 electoral votes, according to The Associated Press. It said if he wins any of four remaining states where vote counts continue — Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina — the 77-year-old Biden would be president-elect.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday filed lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina as he fell behind Biden in seeking the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.

In Pennsylvania, nearly 1.1 million mail ballots remained uncounted by early Wednesday evening, including more than 167,000 in Philadelphia and nearly 156,000 in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, traditionally Democratic areas.

In Nevada, 86 percent of estimated votes have been reported, and state election authorities aren't planning to release another update until Thursday.

In the popular vote, Biden had about 71 million votes to Trump's 68 million.

In 2016, Trump won the Electoral College 306 to 232 for Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote — 65.84 million votes to 62.98 million for Trump.

Republicans appeared to maintain narrow control of the US Senate and reduced the size of the Democrats' majority in the House of Representatives.

In the race for the Senate, Democrats were still two or three seats short they would need to take control of the chamber. In Georgia, one race was headed for a January runoff, and Democrats were hopeful another race would face a runoff.

The AP's projection on early Wednesday of Biden winning Arizona narrowed what it said was his road to winning the presidency. But unlike AP, some media organizations didn't project Biden the winner in the swing state that Trump won in 2016.

Heading into Tuesday's election, polls had shown Trump trailing Biden significantly, but the president's conservative base of supporters turned out in big numbers on Election Day, leading to the close races in key battleground states.

Americans woke up on Wednesday to uncertainty over results in several states, with Trump and Biden both claiming that they would emerge victorious.

On Wednesday, Trump turned to the Supreme Court to intervene in voting in Pennsylvania and demanded a recount in Wisconsin.

His campaign filed a request with the high court to intervene and overturn a Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ruling allowing election officials to count mail-in ballots received up to three days after the election.

The Biden campaign said it was confident that he would win Pennsylvania because a majority of the uncounted ballots were from heavily Democratic areas.

Democratic Governor Tom Wolf said the state will continue to count ballots.

Despite fears that the election was so contentious it could spark civil unrest on Election Day, there were few reports of violence in cities, where many stores had boarded-up windows, but there was no certainty to that as the outcome remains in doubt.

In addition to winning Ohio and Florida, as he did in 2016, the president took Texas, which had emerged as a battleground for the first time in decades. Trump made gains among Hispanic voters, a crucial voting bloc for Democrats, in some states, but especially in Florida.

Speaking from the White House early on Wednesday, Trump prematurely claimed he had won the election and threatened to go to the Supreme Court to stop votes being counted.

He claimed without proof that counting votes after Election Day was a "major fraud". "It's a very sad moment," he said at the White House. "We will win this, and as far as I am concerned, we already have."

Biden accused Trump of making an "outrageous" statement that was a "naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens".