US election: Joe Biden edges ahead of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania vote count

Joe Biden has edged ahead of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania for the first time, leaving the Democratic candidate within touching distance of the White House.

With an estimated 95 per cent of the votes counted, Mr Biden is leading Mr Trump by 49.4 to 49.3 per cent, according to Edison Research.

Before the latest update, Mr Biden had narrowed the gap in Pennsylvania to around 18,000 votes.

The state is potentially decisive in the US election. Should Mr Biden win it, he will have 273 electoral college votes – taking him past the magic 270 number needed to be handed the keys to the White House.

Mr Biden, 77, had trailed Mr Trump, 74, by more than half a million votes at one point in the hours after the polls closed. 

Earlier on Friday the state reported it had 50,000 mail-in votes still to tabulate.

Exit polls have shown Mr Biden has a healthy advantage among voters who decided to post their ballots early – which explains why he has been consistently chipping away at the president’s lead in Pennsylvania.  

Workers in the Keystone State have been methodically counting around 2.6million postal ballots received this year – a vast number prompted by concern among voters about standing in long queues on election day while the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage, having infected more than 100,000 Americans in a single day this week.

Mr Biden actively encouraged supporters to cast their votes early. Mr Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly claimed that mailed-in ballots are open to widespread fraud, leading a higher proportion of his supporters to turn up on election day.

In the days since polls closed on Tuesday, Mr Trump and his surrogates have tried to halt the counting of votes in key swing states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia, citing baseless allegations of electoral fraud and filing a string of successful lawsuits.

On Thursday, as Mr Biden continued to gain ground in those states, the president unleashed a 17-minute rant from the White House briefing room repeating the claims.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,”  he said, without evidence, before unspooling a series of conspiracy theories about mail-in voting.

But on the ground, officials involved in the process remained level-headed.

“There’s still some to count,” said Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state. “So they are working incredibly hard. They are going to keep counting into the evening, and stay tuned.” “We are going to be counting every ballot.”

BBC.