Millions of mail-in ballots and extraordinarily narrow margins in several battleground states mean the results of the 2020 presidential election remain in the balance.
To further complicate the outcome, President Donald Trump’s legal team spent much of Wednesday peppering several states with lawsuits in an attempt to stop the counting of ballots where his lead was shrinking.
Here is the state of play in the swing states that could still decide who is sworn in as president on January 20.
2016 winner: Donald Trump
2020 STATUS: Ballots still being counted
Nowhere was the Trump campaign’s legal battle more vigorous than in Pennsylvania, where Rudy Giuliani, the president’s longtime personal lawyer, arrived as part of a multipronged attack.
Mr Trump saw his sizeable lead slowly whittled down over the course of Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were counted in the heavily Democratic cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
As Mr Trump’s lead narrowed, the campaign said it was suing to halt the counting of votes in the state, even as it claimed that Mr Trump would win when all the ballots were tallied.
Democrat Joe Biden was receiving about three-quarters of the vote in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, and by late on Wednesday Mr Trump’s lead had shrunk to 4 percentage points.
In addition to the new lawsuit to stop the count, the Trump campaign also sought permission to take part in pending Supreme Court litigation over how long the state can collect mail-in ballots. The US high court has previously declined to strike down an extension of the deadline for such ballots, although the case remains live.
“As the president has rightly said, the Supreme Court must resolve this crucial contested legal question,” said Justin Clark, deputy campaign manager.
Late-arriving mail-in ballots, combined with Pennsylvanian rules that prevented authorities from tabulating early votes before election day, are the main reason for the long count in the state, which was expected to stretch well into Thursday. Republicans thwarted efforts to change the rules in a way that would have allowed for the early counting of votes.
“We are exactly where we said we would be,” Kathy Boockvar, the Pennsylvania secretary of state, said on Wednesday morning, adding that about half of the mail-in ballots remained to be counted.
The FT’s final look at Mr Trump’s eleventh-hour push in Pennsylvania, and why it has became pivotal to his re-election chances, can be found here.
2016 winner: Donald Trump
2020 status: Possible recount
Election officials in Wisconsin, another part of the Democrats’ once-invincible “blue wall” in the industrial north, have said their count is complete, and the Associated Press has called the state for Mr Biden with a 20,517-vote margin.
But even before the vote was finished, Bill Stepien, Mr Trump’s campaign manager, said in a statement that the president’s team would immediately request a recount, arguing that the “razor thin” margin “is well within the threshold to request a recount”.
Scott Walker, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, wrote on Twitter that 20,000 votes may be a “high hurdle”, noting that previous recounts in the state had changed the final tally by, at most, a few hundred votes. In addition, state rules prevent a campaign from officially requesting a recount until the tally is certified, which could take several more days.
Wisconsin was always expected to take a while to finish its count because, like Pennsylvania, election rules meant that it could not process early ballots before election day.
An FT look at voter turnout in Wisconsin, and how Democrats tried to boost African-American participation in Milwaukee and other cities, can be found here.
2016 winner: Donald Trump
2020 status: CALLED FOR BIDEN
Before Michigan was called for Mr Biden on Wednesday evening, the Trump campaign said it had filed a lawsuit to halt the counting of votes in the state, alleging it had not been given “meaningful access” to observe the count in several locations.
Mr Stepien said in a statement that the lawsuit filed in state court sought to halt the count until they were given access, as well as a “review” of ballots already counted. The lawsuit asked specifically to stop counting absentee ballots, which were believed to favour Democrats.
With Mr Biden now in the lead in the state, it remains unclear how the Trump legal team will proceed because the stopping of vote count would essentially hand the state to the former vice-president.
Like other big industrial states in the Midwest, Michigan’s rules prevented election officials from processing early ballots before election day, creating big shifts in the margin from Mr Trump to Mr Biden over the course of Wednesday’s counting.
2016 winner: Donald Trump
2020 status: ballots still being counted
The question of ballot deadlines is also being contested in North Carolina, a “new South” state that was always seen as a bit of a long shot for Mr Biden.
The state elections board has said in a court-approved settlement that mail-in ballots could arrive up to six days after November 3. The US Supreme Court last week declined to issue an injunction against the extension, but the case remains live in the lower courts.
Mr Biden has so far outperformed 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton significantly in suburban counties, such as Wake, home to the state’s famed “research triangle”. Mrs Clinton won by almost 20 percentage points in Wake county, but Mr Biden, with nearly 95 per cent of the vote counted, was up by closer to 27 points.
The former vice-president’s strength in the suburbs has put him within striking distance of Mr Trump, but it may simply narrow his losing margin to the incumbent, who was ahead statewide by about 1 percentage point with 95 per cent of the vote counted.
An FT look at the changing demographics of the “new South” and how it put North Carolina in play can be found here.
2016 winner: Hillary Clinton
2020 status: Ballots still being counted
Nevada was slow to get its vote counting started on Tuesday night after a state judge kept 30 polling locations in predominantly Democratic Clark county, which includes Las Vegas, open for an extra hour.
The ruling came in response to a lawsuit from the Trump campaign that cited delays in opening the polling locations on Tuesday morning. Democrats had also asked for some of the sites to be kept open for longer.
Mr Biden was ahead on Wednesday evening, but his lead was gradually narrowed as new votes were tallied, keeping the state — the only one still in question that went for Mrs Clinton in 2016 — too close to call.
Nevada election officials on Wednesday said they had completed counting all in-person ballots, both those cast on election day and in early voting, but were still working their way through late-arriving postal votes. The state elections division announced it would not be releasing new data on the count until Thursday.
Clark county, by far the state’s largest, will be the focus going forward. There were still tens of thousands of votes to count there on Wednesday and a handful of outstanding court cases.
In the run-up to election day, Mr Trump’s legal team had sought to halt the processing of some mail-in ballots in Clark in an emergency appeal to the state’s supreme court.
A lower state court on Monday rejected the campaign’s challenge to how the county verifies signatures on postal ballots, as well as the “duplication” process it uses to ensure ballots can be fed into counting machines.
Clark county uses machines to verify signatures, and when ballots have issues that make it difficult to feed into automated counting machines, election officials create a duplicate. The Trump campaign claimed these processes meant they were unable to properly monitor the count, and that the machine signature verification was unlawful under Nevada law.
2016 winner: Donald Trump
2020 status: Ballots still being counted
Although Mr Trump has maintained a lead in Georgia, observers have held off from calling the state because of ballots still to be counted in what has emerged as one of Mr Biden’s strongest areas: the suburbs.
DeKalb and Clayton counties, vote-rich suburban areas around Atlanta, still had thousands of votes to tabulate on Wednesday evening. In addition, Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, was hoping to finish counting 36,000 remaining ballots by late Wednesday. All three counties were seeing returns coming in heavily for Mr Biden.
With Mr Trump’s lead narrowing, the president’s campaign announced a lawsuit in Georgia state court insisting the state’s ballot count be paused because it believes some votes arrived after polls had closed.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, said at midday on Wednesday that about 200,000 absentee ballots remained uncounted, as well as 40,000 to 50,000 votes cast before election day in early voting.
Live updates
Follow the latest US election news here.