Joe Biden widens poll margin with Arizona win

Congratulations from China as vote officials reject fraud claims by Trump
Joe Biden
Transition delay: Joe Biden with his wife Jill
AP
Michael Howie13 November 2020

Joe Biden extended his winning  margin in the US election today by capturing the battleground state of Arizona as federal poll officials dismissed Donald Trump’s claims of cheating.  

In a further blow for Mr Trump, China congratulated the President-elect saying “we respect the choice of the American people”. Mr Trump is refusing to concede defeat claiming the election was “stolen” from him.  

Mr Biden had been widely projected to win Arizona’s 11 electoral votes — becoming the first Democrat to claim the southern state in a presidential race since Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996.  

Victory for Mr Biden in Arizona takes his tally in the Electoral College that determines the winner to 290 against Mr Trump’s 217, an insurmountable lead with only Georgia and North Carolina still to be declared. However the 77-year-old’s transition to the White House following the November 3 poll is being hampered by the President’s refusal to accept he lost amid a barrage of electoral fraud claims from him and fellow Republicans. Those claims have now been repudiated by a committee of federal election officials who said the White House vote was the “most secure in American history”.

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the committee announced.

It came after Mr Trump claimed without evidence that 2.7 million votes for him had been “deleted” in his latest Twitter attack. His refusal to accept the result has stalled the process of transitioning to a new administration.  

Meanwhile Barack Obama has warned that Republicans are walking a “dangerous path” by endorsing Mr Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.

In an interview that will air on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, the former president said: “It’s one more step in de-legitimising not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally, and that’s a dangerous path.” Mr Obama has said his successor was elected because “millions of Americans were spooked by a black man in the White House”. Excerpts of his memoir A Promised Land, which is published on Tuesday, have been released in the press.  

Mr Obama wrote: “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.”

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