COLUMBUS – On the second day after the election, Joe Biden stood on the brink of winning the presidency, needing to clinch just one more battleground state to defeat President Donald Trump.
But, neither Biden nor Trump had yet cleared the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House early Thursday as vote counting continued in several states.
The race was decided in Trump’s favor in Ohio on Tuesday night as unofficial election results showed more than 5.8 million Ohioans voted, breaking the all-time record set in 2008 with over 300,000 absentee and provisional ballots still outstanding, according to Secretary of State Frank LaRose.
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“Partnering with the bipartisan county boards of elections, we sweated throughout the spring and summer to boost participation in early voting opportunities, make sure voters were safe, voting systems were secure, and enough poll workers trained and ready. And it worked. Ohio shattered the record and voters proved it’s easy to make your voice heard in the Buckeye State.” -Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose
While there were some hiccups, voting-rights groups say, overall, the election in Ohio went relatively smoothly. In Franklin County, electronic registration went down forcing poll workers to use backup paper poll books instead, slowing down voting at the county’s 324 polling locations.
Kayla Griffin, Ohio director of All Voting is Local, says that one area that could have been better managed was facilitation of curbside voting.
“A lot of people were told that they couldn’t curbside or we’re told they still had to come inside, stand in line in order to get a ballot, and that really defeats the purpose of curbside,” Griffin said.
By Thursday morning, Biden had already won the fiercely contested prizes of Michigan and Wisconsin, part of the “blue wall” that slipped away from Democrats four years ago. Various news organizations unofficially awarded him 264 electoral votes to Trump’s 214 while others put the margin at 253-213.
Biden addressed supporters the day after the election, sounding optimistic but not over-confident.
“I’m not here to declare that we’ve won, but I am here to report: when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners,” he said.
Protesters took to the streets in several cities, including Columbus, where about 150 demonstrators marched around the Ohio Statehouse to demand a free and fair election. Thousands of anti-Trump protesters in other cities demanded a complete count of the ballots while angry Trump supporters converged on vote-counting centers in Detroit and Phoenix.
Legal challenges were filed by the president’s campaign in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, joining existing Republican legal challenges in Pennsylvania and Nevada. The new filings demand better access for campaign observers to locations where ballots are being processed and counted and raise absentee ballot concerns.
Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman issued a statement congratulating Trump on his victory in the state but opposing any attempt to prematurely halt the vote count.
“Under our Constitution, state legislatures set the rules and states administer our elections. We should respect that process and ensure that all ballots cast in accordance with state laws are counted. It’s that simple. I hope we can reach a final resolution as quickly as possible” -Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH)
In Pennsylvania,- there were roughly 1 million votes left to be counted late Wednesday while Georgia was too early to call because an estimated 4% of the vote still remained uncounted, including mailed ballots from the Atlanta metro region that leans Democratic.