In a nail-biting race, Donald Trump accused rivals of fraud and said he would seek the US Supreme Court to stop the vote count for early ballots in key states where he led the race.
He doubled down on his unsubstantiated claims that Democrats are attempting to steal the election through fraud.
Extolling his results in key states in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, he pointed to races like Arizona where he said “somebody” was calling for the Democrats.
He said he was on course to win but then “it suddenly stopped”.
“A very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise” the millions of people who voted for Mr Trump, the Republican president said at the White House.
“We will win this. As far as I’m concerned, we already have,” he said.
“Most importantly, we’re winning Pennsylvania by a tremendous amount,” the president said. “We’re up 690,000 votes in Pennsylvania – this isn’t even close with 64 per cent of the vote in, it’s not even close … We’re winning in Michigan by 300,000 votes, I saw it and said ‘wow … we don’t even need all of them.’”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
Mr Trump said the American public were victims of fraud.
“We were getting ready to win this election – frankly, we did win this election.”
A subdued president said he would press the Supreme Court to rule on the counting of ballots cast early, and demanded that officials ensure the integrity of the election process – without any evidence of widespread fraud that could have affected the outcome.
