By Geoffrey Smith and Peter Nurse
Investing.com -- Joe Biden now has more votes than President Donald Trump in the still-contested state of Pennsylvania, CNN and others reported Friday.
The news all but clinches the presidential election for the Democratic Party nominee and former vice-president - notwithstanding legal challenges from Trump that have so far failed to cut any ice in state courts.
Pennsylvania's 20 votes in the electoral college would take him above the 270 needed for victory, pending ratification by the officially recognized authorities. So far, all results reported to data are preliminary and projections by unofficial statisticians and TV stations. According to those calculations, Biden currently has 253 electoral college votes, just short of the 270 needed to win.
Overnight, Biden had already taken the lead in vote-counting in Georgia, after Clayton County, a voting district that covers some of the southern fringes and suburbs of Atlanta, reported its results. Final votes are still being counted, both in Clayton and across the state.
Georgia was seen as a Republican stronghold. The state, which has 16 votes in the electoral college, hasn't backed a Democrat for president since voting for Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. Pennsylvania, by contrast, was a crucial swing state that both Trump had to win to have any realistic hope of winning a second term.
Arizona still unclear
Biden, meanwhile, saw his lead in Arizona shrink to around 47,000 by early on Friday; he was still ahead in Nevada by only 12,000 votes.
Georgia and Pennsylvania officials expect to finish counting on Friday, while Arizona and Nevada were still expected to take days to finalize their vote totals.
Trump, 74, has sought to portray as fraudulent the slow counting of mail-in ballots, which surged in popularity due to fears of exposure to the coronavirus through in-person voting. As counts from those ballots have been tallied, they have eroded the initial strong leads the president had in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.
States have historically taken time after Election Day to tally all votes.
Trump fired off several tweets in the early morning hours on Friday, reiterating the complaints he aired earlier at the White House. "I easily WIN the Presidency of the United States with LEGAL VOTES CAST," he said on Twitter, without offering any evidence that any illegal votes have been cast.
Twitter flagged the post as possibly misleading, something it has done to numerous posts by Trump since Election Day.
Trump repeats assault on vote-counting process
In an extraordinary assault on the democratic process, Trump appeared in the White House briefing room on Thursday evening and baselessly alleged the election was being "stolen" from him.
Offering no evidence, Trump lambasted election workers and sharply criticized polling before the election that he said was designed to suppress the vote because it favored Biden.
"They're trying to rig an election, and we can't let that happen," said Trump, who spoke for about 15 minutes in the White House briefing room before leaving without taking questions. Several TV networks cut away during his remarks, with anchors saying they needed to correct his statements.
Biden, who earlier in the day urged patience as votes were counted, responded on Twitter: "No one is going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever."
Trump's incendiary remarks followed a series of Twitter posts from him earlier in the day that called for vote counting to stop, even though if voting were to stop right now, he currently trails Biden in enough states to hand the Democrat the presidency.
Trump's campaign, meanwhile, pursued a flurry of lawsuits in several states, though judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly rejected challenges there. Legal experts said the cases had little chance of affecting the electoral outcome, and Biden campaign senior legal adviser Bob Bauer call them part of a "broader misinformation campaign."
The close election underscored the nation's deep political divides, while the slow count of millions of mail-in ballots served as a reminder of the coronavirus still sweeping America.
Biden, if he prevails, will nevertheless have failed to deliver the sweeping repudiation to Trump that Democrats had hoped for, reflecting the deep support the president enjoys despite his tumultuous four years in office. Trump's influence on the Republican Party will remain strong, even if he ultimately loses a tight election.
The winner will face a pandemic that has killed more than 234,000 Americans and left millions more out of work, even as the country still grapples with the aftermath of months of unrest over race relations and police brutality.
Biden's lead in the national popular vote broke 4 million on Thursday night, though that plays no role in deciding the winner. Trump lost the popular vote by about 3 million to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, when he secured an upset victory by winning key states in the Electoral College.
(Reuters contributed to this article)