Who will be U.S. president? Trump threatens legal action, Biden calls for patience amid tight race

WASHINGTON, D.C. (NEWS 1130) — Without a clear winner in the U.S. presidential election by late Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, Democratic candidate Joe Biden stressed the importance of counting every ballot, while President Donald Trump threatened to go to the courts to stop further votes from being tallied.

Results in several key battleground states were in flux as election officials processed a historically large number of mail-in votes. As presidential results came in, the nation braced for an outcome that might not be known for days.

Neither candidate secured the 270 electoral college votes needed to secure the presidency on election night, with the race too close between both candidates.

It was in this context that Biden and Trump delivered early-morning speeches, with the former vice president projecting an eventual victory and Trump falsely declaring an election-night “win.”

Biden delivered brief comments to supporters at a drive-in rally in his home state of Delaware.

“We believe we’re on track to win this election,” he said. “We knew because of the unprecedented early vote — the mail-in vote — it’s gonna take a while. We’re gonna have to be patient. Until the hard work of tallying votes is finished. And it ain’t over till every vote is counted. Every ballot is counted.”

After Biden took the stage, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to say his Republicans were ahead.

“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Trump wrote in a tweet that was quickly censored by Twitter, which said the context of the post is “disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”

Addressing supporters in the East Room of the White House, Trump said the turnout for him was “tremendous.”

“The citizens of this country have come out in record numbers. This is a record. There’s never been anything like it to support our incredible movement,” he said. “We were getting ready to win this election, frankly, we did win this election.”

During his remarks, Trump said he planned to get the courts involved but stopped short of explaining what that would mean.

“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list,” Trump said.

The tight overall contest reflected a deeply polarized nation struggling to respond to the worst health crisis in more than a century, with millions of lost jobs, and a reckoning on racial injustice. Trump and Biden have spent the better part of this year in a heated fight over how to confront those challenges, and each has argued in apocalyptic terms that his opponent would set the country on a devastating path.

-With files from the Associated Press

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