Biden Takes Narrow 5k-Vote Lead In PA As USPS Finds More Ballots In Philly
ZeroHedge.com
Update (0910ET): After the NBC News decision desk briefly called PA for Biden (saying the outcome had officially put Biden over the top, making him the new president-elect), it looks like that decision has been retracted.
The Hill still has Biden up by 5,587 votes in PA.
Quintanilla has deleted a tweet referring to Biden as “President-elect”, but this one remained up.
However, others are insisting that the battle for PA has already been lost.
But as the old saying goes: it ain’t over till it’
And as President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., pointed out, there have been many notable ‘irregularities’ which, while not uncommon in past American elections, could play a major role as the Congress and the courts try to parse the true victor.
Here’s where Fox has things as of early Thursday morning in the US.
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Update (0900ET): NBC News has officially declared that Biden has taken the lead in PA just before 0900 on Friday morning, moving him closer to defeating President Trump, with tens of thousands of votes still available to be counted. Biden took a lead of 5,587 votes as ballots from Philadelphia were counted.
It’s the second major encouraging sign for Biden Friday am, coming hours after he reportedly took the lead in Georgia, a state that President Trump was favored.
Interestingly, the news of Biden taking the lead in PA comes as USPS has found more ballots in Philly, a heavily Democratic stronghold. News of the discovery of the 1,000+ new ballots bu USPS comes via Politico.
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Update (0800ET): Nevada’s AG has said he is “skeptical” of President Trump’s arguments about why the vote should be stopped, yet the flurry of legal challenges continues, as President Trump battles to preclude the possibility of a Biden victory.
Trump, speaking to reporters late last night, said he has no doubt that he won. Meanwhile, backers of the president are carrying guns, ramped up demonstrations on Thursday night against what Trump claims has been a rigged election, in Nevada, Arizona and other Western states.
Despite all those calls for violence, and boarded up stores and strip malls in anticipation of the chaos that has occasionally dotted the American urban landscape this year, demonstrators on both sides were mostly peaceful.
In Arizona, one of the closely contested states, Trump and Biden supporters briefly scuffled outside the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix.
According to Reuters, several heavily armed right-wing groups assembled on the site as election workers counted votes inside. Election officials continued to tabulate ballots across the country, in some cases processing an unprecedented number of mail-in ballotss
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As we head into day three of counting the ballots, Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt told CNN he expects an update in the next few hours as they kept counting through the night.
There are 50,000 votes left to be counted there, he said. Despite a dustup that was the result of observers from both the Trump and Biden campaigns have been present observing the counting process, Schmidt said. “We have no doubt when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be declared the winners” he added.
Here’s the most up to date map from Bloomberg:
Source: Bloomberg
In Georgia, Biden took a lead of more than 900 votes at about 0430 Friday morning: the lead has since grown to 1,096 votes. He gained the lead initially came after Clayton County in the Atlanta suburbs reported a bucket of ballots. Biden had been winning a huge proportion of the votes in that area. Other Atlanta suburbs are still reporting.
Georgia hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since Bill Clinton in 1992, He won in the state by 13,000 votes, garnering 43% of the votes cast. With 14,097 votes left to count in Georgia President Trump’s lead over Joe Biden had evaporated to a mere 1,775 votes
In PA, Trump’s lead stood at 18,229 votes at 0600ET though it seems to steadily be shrinking. More mailed-in ballots, which Biden is winning by a healthy margin, are still expected to be counted, with many of them from the heavily Democratic city of Philadelphia and its suburbs. More mailed-in ballots are also set to be counted on Friday in Allegheny County, the home of Pittsburgh.
However, in Georgia, a local reporter summed up the situation with all the attendant frustration and vitriol. Robin Kemp, the reporter in Clayton County, acknowledged that “yes” the votes are still being counted” and that no clear winner has emerged.
If, by some miracle, Biden does pull off a victory in Georgia, it would be a historic moment for Dems. But it wouldn’t necessarily translate to a victory: Also, for readers who aren’t familiar with the other votes that take days to fully count these are validly cast ballots, just being counted now.
Biden also retains leads in the states of Nevada and Arizona, where ballots are still being counted, and mail in ballots from thousands of older retirees remain to be counted. While the MSM is branding those states as Biden upsets, with votes being counted at a glacial pace, there is still plenty of room for Trump to pull through.
With PA remaining the biggest available prize, every major network has Biden leading with at least 253 electoral votes, meaning that if he were to win Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes, he would have more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Fox News and the Associated Press have both called the race for Biden in Arizona, projecting him as the winner of that state’s 11 electoral votes, though other networks have abstained.
While the MSM seems to be fixated on Biden winning Arizona and Nevada, conservative and independent journalists have focused on the Democrats’ dragging their feet on counting the votes in PA.
While USPS proclaimed that it may have somehow lost mail-in ballots, raising the specter of an “illegitimate” vote, stock futures turned red as markets began to contemplate the ‘doomsday scenario’.
If Biden does pull away with GA…
As stock futures turn red, it seems nobody wants to even acknowledge the growing possibility of we have lightheartedly called “the doomsday scenario”. That is, if Biden wins GA and its 16 electoral votes, but loses Arizona (11) and Nevada (6), the race could ultimately come down to PA, potentially leaving either the Supreme Court, or the House, to decide the outcome of the vote.
As the legal wrangling drags on, the DOJ is looking into whether mail-in ballots in Nevada were improperly cast by people who’d moved out of the state, while a federal judge denied the Trump campaign’s emergency request to stop counting in Philadelphia. Though Trump has stumbled in court, the lawsuit claims are still arousing his base.