Trump demands halt to vote counting as US presidency hangs in the balance

Joe Biden picked up a win in Wisconsin, but hundreds of thousands of votes are outstanding in Pennsylvania.

Mr Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien said the president plans to request a recount in Wisconsin, where a gap of less than 1 percentage point means the trailing candidate can force a review.

Mr Stepien said: “The president is well within the threshold to request a recount and we will immediately do so.”

The two candidates, who have proposed dramatically different visions for the nation, split territory across the US after polls closed on Tuesday night.

With neither candidate securing the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House, Mr Biden on Wednesday said he was not ready to declare victory but added: “When the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.”

Speaking in Delaware alongside his running mate, Kamala Harris, Mr Biden said: “Every vote must be counted. We the people will not be silenced.”

But Mr Trump, in an extraordinary move from the White House, called for outstanding ballots not to be counted.

The Republican president made premature claims of victories in several key states and said he would take the election to the Supreme Court to stop the counting. It was unclear exactly what legal action he might try to pursue.

Vote tabulations routinely continue beyond election day, and states largely set the rules for when the count has to end.

Several states allow mailed-in votes to be accepted after election day as long as they are postmarked by Tuesday. They include Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by November 3 can be accepted if they arrive up to three days after the election.

Mr Trump suggested those ballots should not be counted.

Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf tweeted that his state had more than a million ballots to be counted, and said officials “promised Pennsylvanians that we would count every vote and that’s what we’re going to do”.

Democrats typically outperform Republicans in mail voting, while the Republicans look to make up ground in election day turnout. That means the early margins between the candidates could be influenced by which type of votes — early or election day — being reported by the states.

Throughout the campaign, Mr Trump cast doubt on the integrity of the election and repeatedly suggested that mail-in ballots should not be counted. Both campaigns have teams of lawyers at the ready to move into battleground states if there are legal challenges.

The tight overall contest reflects a deeply polarised nation struggling to respond to the worst health crisis in more than a century, with millions of lost jobs, and a reckoning on racial injustice.

Mr Trump kept several states, including Texas, Iowa and Ohio, where Mr Biden had made a strong play in the final stages of the campaign, but the Democrat also picked off states where the president sought to compete, including New Hampshire and Minnesota.

Florida was the biggest and most fiercely contested battleground on the map, with both campaigns battling over the 29 electoral college votes that went to Mr Trump.