The Associated Press and other U.S. media outlets have forecast that former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party candidate, has won the U.S. presidential elections. As yet, countries within Current Time’s coverage region do not appear to have responded officially to this prognosis.
The AP, which tracks vote counts in U.S. presidential elections, projects that former Vice President Biden, 77, and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, 56, have received Pennsylvania’s 20 votes and Nevada's six votes in the Electoral College. That number gives Biden a total of 279 electoral votes, nine votes more than are necessary for official election as president.
Current Time is broadcasting a special report about this development.
In response to the prognosis, former Vice President Biden tweeted that “I will be a President for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not.” Senator Harris, projected to be the country’s first female Vice President of Jamaican and Indian descent, tweeted that the election “is about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it.”
The vote count in Pennsylvania and Nevada and four other battleground states -- Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina – has not yet been finalized, however. Currently, Biden has slim leads -- 0.2 to 0.5 percentage points -- in Georgia (16 electoral votes) and Arizona (11 electoral votes).
Some outlets, following the AP’s prognoses, have forecast, though, that the Biden-Harris team has won Arizona (11 electoral votes) for a total of 290 electoral votes.
Incumbent Republican President Donald J. Trump , who has acquired an estimated 214 electoral votes, has not recognized the updated electoral vote tally for Biden and Harris. Since the November 3 presidential election, as Biden’s votes gained momentum in these key battleground states, the 74-year-old President Trump has alleged vote fraud, but without providing detailed proof for that accusation.
“The simple fact is this election is far from over,” the Trump campaign stressed in a November 7 statement, cited by the AP. The campaign alleges that its observers “were not permitted meaningful access to watch the counting process” in Pennsylvania.
The work on legal challenges to the vote count will continue on November 9, it has stated.
“Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media,” the campaign concluded.
In Russia, one senior politician, a member of the ruling United Russia party, which had supported Trump's 2016 election, advised caution.
Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, noted that no official result has been released yet and that President Trump has pledged to continue with lawsuits over the vote count and results. For Kosachev, that “confirms” that there is still “no clear, unconditional, and convincing winner,” the Russian news agency Interfax reported.
“Whoever wins, he will not have the full moral right to say that all of America is behind him,” Kosachev commented.
