Biden trumps don

Washington: Democrat Joe Biden has become the new US President with Kamala Harris as the first female, Black and Indian-origin vice-president, ousting Donald Trump and Mike Pence from the White House.

Votes are still being counted in at least five states three days after election day, with mail-in ballots in the middle of a pandemic complicating an already unusual system. The painfully slow counting took a dramatic turn on Saturday when Joe Biden overtook Donald Trump in the battleground state of Georgia, which has been historically red.

Trump's hopes of retaining the White House were dashed when major US networks called Georgia for Biden, taking the latter to the magic mark of 270 in the state-by-state Electoral College votes. Trump needed to hang onto both Georgia and Pennsylvania, and to overtake Biden in either Nevada or Arizona. Donald Trump has launched a tirade of unsubstantiated claims that he had been cheated out of winning the US election. "They are trying to steal the election," an increasingly isolated Trump said in an extraordinary appearance at the White House on Thursday, two days after polls closed.

Providing no evidence and taking no questions 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.

Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States, after a victory in the state where he was born put him over the 270 electoral votes needed to win. With Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes, Biden now has a total of 284 electoral votes.

Before becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Biden served as vice president under former President Barack Obama. He is also Delaware's longest-serving senator.

Throughout his campaign, Biden has argued that the "soul of the nation" is at stake and has promised that he would seek to heal a country fractured by Trump's presidency.

As of Saturday morning, 16 out of 43 Trump tweets, or 37%, had been labeled by Twitter cautioning users that "some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process."

Ellen Weintraub, with the Federal Election Commission, denied any incident of fraud regarding the US elections. In a statement, Weintraub said, "State and local officials and poll workers throughout the country really stepped up. And there have been very few complaints about how this election was run," Weintraub said.

Another in a line of repeated attacks on the vote counting process in various states where Joe Biden has taken the lead, Donald Trump said that "bad things were happening" inside counting centres. "....Bad things took place during those hours where LEGAL TRANSPARENCY was viciously & crudely not allowed. Tractors blocked doors & windows were covered with thick cardboard so that observers could not see into the count rooms.

BAD THINGS HAPPENED INSIDE. BIG CHANGES TOOK PLACE!," he said in a post on Twitter.