Democrat Joe Biden pulled ahead Friday, November 6, in the crucial battleground state of Georgia, US media said, with votes still left to count.

The former vice president ate away at President Donald Trump’s initial lead in the southern state and is now ahead by 917 votes, CNN and Fox News reported.

Trump won Georgia by 5 percentage points in 2016.

President Donald Trump earlier erupted in a tirade of unsubstantiated claims that he has been cheated out of winning the US election as vote counting across battleground states showed Democrat Joe Biden steadily closing in on victory.

“They are trying to steal the election,” an increasingly isolated Trump said in an extraordinary statement at the White House two days after polls closed.

Providing no evidence and taking no questions afterward from reporters, Trump spent nearly 17 minutes making the kind of incendiary statements about the country’s democratic process that have never been heard before from a US president.

According to Trump, Democrats were using “illegal votes” to “steal the election from us.”

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he claimed. “They’re trying to rig an election. And we can’t let that happen.”

Beyond the rhetoric, Trump’s complaints were specifically targeting the integrity of the huge number of ballots mailed in, rather than cast in person on Election Day.

The big shift to postal ballots this year reflected the desire of voters to avoid risking exposure to COVID-19 in crowded polling stations during a pandemic that has already killed close to 235,000 Americans. – Rappler.com