U.S. President-elect Joe Biden cemented his electoral
victory by capturing the battleground state of Arizona late on Thursday,
throwing President Trump into more political misery.
Biden’s electoral college votes have now risen to 290, while
Trump has 217 votes.
Biden only needs 270 votes to claim the presidency. He
reached the threshold on Saturday and was declared the winner by the country’s
media networks.
Trump so far has refused to recognise Biden as President
elect, as he mounts legal battles in some battleground states, trying to
overturn the results.
Observers have said the legal challenges will fizzle out.
Biden, with 1,668,684 votes, was projected to win Arizona,
Thursday night, after more than a week of vote counting, Edison Research said.
AP and Fox News already gave the state to Biden since last
week.
Biden becomes only the second Democratic presidential
candidate in seven decades to win the traditionally Republican state.
Apart from having 290 electoral votes, Democrat Biden is
also winning the popular vote by more than 5.3 million votes, or 3.4 percentage
points.
With only a few states still counting votes, the electoral
math is daunting for Trump, who has claimed without evidence that the election
was marred by widespread fraud.
The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits challenging the vote
counts in numerous states, although some have already been thrown out by
judges. Legal experts have said the litigation stands little chance of altering
the outcome, and state election officials have said they see no evidence of
serious irregularities or fraud.
Trump’s refusal to accept the result of the Nov. 3 election
has stalled the process of transitioning to a new administration. The federal
agency that normally would release funding to an incoming president-elect, the
General Services Administration, has not yet recognised Biden as the winner.
His pick for White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, told
MSNBC on Thursday that receiving transition funding is important given the U.S.
government will roll out a coronavirus vaccination campaign early next year.
“The sooner we can
get our transition experts into meetings with the folks who are planning a
vaccination campaign, the more seamless the transition to a Biden presidency
from a Trump presidency can be,” Klain said.
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