Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, has taken the lead for the first time in the battleground state of Georgia by 917 votes, as counting continues.
Biden is locked in a tight election race with President Donald Trump in which no candidate currently has enough Electoral College votes to be declared the winner.
With its 16 electoral votes, winning the state would put Biden just one shy of the crucial 270 threshold needed to win the presidency.
If Biden sustains and increases his lead in Georgia, he will successfully flip another state in the US election. Since 1964 the Peach State has only voted for a Democratic presidential candidate four times, the last time for Bill Clinton in 1992.
Biden has a lead of more than 11,000 votes in Nevada, after 89% of expected votes counted. Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania has dropped to fewer than 20,000 votes as mail-in and absentee ballots are counted, with hundreds of thousands of votes remaining. But the president has cut rival’s lead in Arizona, with Biden leading by about 7,000 votes in the southwestern state.
Donald Trump has doubled down on unsubstantiated claims his political opponents are trying to rig and steal the US election.
Speaking from the White House, the president said “we can’t allow anyone to silence our voters and manufacture results” – but declined to offer any evidence for his allegations of corruption and wide-scale ballot tampering.
He insisted that “if you count the legal votes, I easily win”, despite no victor having been announced yet and Joe Biden leading in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.