With the election coming down to results in a handful of states, officials are cautioning that the outcomes is some areas will not be clear any time soon.

In Nevada, where projections are almost neck and neck, Deputy Secretary of State Wayne Thorley told the BBC’s US partner CBS there would be no results coming on Wednesday and that they would post results on Thursday at about 09:00 (17:00 GMT).

On the BBC’s results system, with 85% of the votes counted, Biden had a slender lead in Nevada of 7,647 votes.

As we reported earlier, Arizona is also not expected to report final results on Wednesday. With 83% of the ballots counted, Biden leads Trump by 51%-48%. Some US media have already projected it as a Biden win.

In the battleground state of Georgia, the elections director in Fulton County – the state’s most populous county – said counting should be finished by the end of Wednesday.

“As long as it takes we’re going to be here, that’s why we’re bringing in fresh bodies,” Richard Barron told a news conference.

On the BBC’s system, 92% of votes in Fulton County have been counted, 72% are for Biden and 27% for Trump. State-wide, with 94% of the votes counted, Biden is on 49% and Trump on 50%.

Joe Biden’s speech delivered a confident message and talked about the importance of uniting the nation. “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.

Key states are still counting ballots, but the Democrat said he has already won the most votes of any presidential candidate ever.

That claim is true – as of 23:00 GMT on Wednesday, Biden has won 70.5 million voters – three million more than Trump’s 67.2 million.

Former President Barack Obama had held the record for most votes – he won 69.5 million in 2008.

Of course vote counts rise with the US population at large, and Biden’s boast comes in an election with near-record turnout. Trump benefited from this too – he won more votes than he received in 2016.

And as we know, winning the popular vote does not guarantee a candidate the White House – we’ll stay watching those crucial states – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – in the coming hours and perhaps days to see how the votes tally up.

Trump campaign files lawsuit in Georgia
Donald Trump’s campaign is seeking to stop vote counts in parts of Georgia – an important battleground state that has not yet been projected for either candidate.

The lawsuit alleges that a Republican observer saw a poll worker add 53 late postal ballots to a stack of ballots that arrived on time in Chatham County. In Georgia, ballots must be received before 19:00 on election day to be counted.

It’s the fourth key state where the president has filed legal challenges. He has vowed to stop the count in places where he says ballots are “fraudulent”. But he has not provided any evidence to support those claims.

In Michigan, his campaign filed a lawsuit to stop officials counting ballots. Biden is projected to win in the state with a slim margin
In Pennsylvania, Republicans are appealing against the state’s decision to count ballots that are postmarked by election day but arrive up to three days later. Hundreds of thousands of votes are yet to be counted in the state
In Wisconsin, the president’s campaign said it has requested a recount “based on abnormalities seen” on Tuesday

We’ve been asking our readers for their most pressing questions about the election. Now it’s our turn to respond.

Judy, from BC, Canada, asks: Pretty much everyone in the world is fed up with this “electoral college” nonsense. So how hard is it to just make US elections a majority vote and dump the college?

The US electoral system is laid out in the constitution, so changing it would require a constitutional amendment.

This would have to be approved by two-thirds of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, or the same proportion of state legislatures. This would then need to be ratified by three-quarters of states.

This is very unlikely to be successful, although there have been attempts to change the system in the past.

There is an ongoing effort by some states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, no matter who wins there. This is a way off, but would effectively nullify the electoral college.

Source: BBC