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Donald Trump is to launch a series of legal challenges to the US election result as it looks increasingly likely that he has lost the Presidency to the challenger Joe Biden. With mail-in and absentee ballots still being counted in four crucial states including, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, the likely path for Trump back to the White House looks near impossible, albeit in a very tight race.
However, Trump says he will not go down without a fight and has claimed voting irregularities and even a conspiracy against his campaign has led to fraudulent results in the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Michigan and Wisconsin have already been called in favour of Biden.
Trump's legal challenges include the demand that votes stop being counted in Pennsylvania as 'meaningful access' hasn't been allowed to observers from both parties. He is also demanding a recount of ballots in close run states and, in Nevada, a claim has been launched saying tens-of-thousands of voters that do not live in Nevada falsely voted there.
He used his twitter account to launch a series of claims that votes were being mishandled and a speech in which he said that votes were being manipulated in the night. Such claims have also been made by conspiracy websites.
In one tweet, that is now hidden by Twitter, Donald Trump said:
"Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key states, in almost all instances Democrat run and controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE."
The reason that Trump led in so many states early on was due to the fact that he encouraged his voters to vote in person while the Democratic Party strongly encouraged voters to vote by mail or to vote early. As in many states the mail votes are counted after the in-person votes this has resulted in huge leads by Trump being slowly eroded.
Bernie Sanders had said in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel just before the election that this was exactly what Trump would do.
Biden already leads the popular vote by over 3 million votes with mostly postal ballots still to be counted, up to 1 million in Pennsylvania alone.
Biden is yet to claim victory, however he said he was on a clear path and that when the voting was finished he believes the Democrats will have won. He said in a reserved speech:
"When the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners. I will govern as an American president. The presidency itself is not a partisan institution."
Small protests have begun taking place outside a number of voting centres in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona, these have so far remained almost entirely peaceful and attended by supporters of both candidates.
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