U.S. settles in for long vote count, with early results close in many states

Nov. 3 (UPI) -- Americans settled in for a long night of election returns Tuesday, with many states too close to call with key battleground states still counting ballots into Wednesday morning.

President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden are facing off in an election that, due to an increase in mail-in voting, did not follow a traditional election night timeline. It's possible a projected winner may not be known for days.

The race has been called in Kentucky (8 electoral votes), Mississippi (6), Missouri (10), South Carolina (9), Louisiana (8), Alabama (9), Kansas (6), Utah (6), South Dakota (3), North Dakota (3), Indiana (11), Tennessee (11), West Virginia (5), Arkansas (6), Wyoming (3), Oklahoma (7), Idaho (4), Ohio (18), Florida (29), Texas (38) and Montana (3) for Trump. Four of Nebraska's five electoral votes have also been called for Trump.

And Biden is the projected winner in California (55), New York (29), New Jersey (14), Illinois (20), Oregon (7), Washington (12), New Mexico (5), Colorado (9), Connecticut (7), Washington, D.C. (3), Massachusetts (11), Maryland (10), Delaware (3), New Hampshire (4), Virginia (13), Minnesota (10), Rhode Island (4), Hawaii (4) and Vermont (3). He also secured one congressional vote from Nebraska.

Biden has 224 electoral votes to Trump's 213 with a winner needing 270.

In the battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan, experts won't be able to call the state for either candidate until they have a full picture of all the votes.

Early returns in Georgia (16) favored Trump with 93% of precincts voting, as did Michigan (16) with 77% counted. North Carolina (15) leaned toward Trump with 95% of the votes reported.

With 74% of votes reported, Pennsylvania (20) favored Trump, but the mail-in ballot counting is expected to stretch into days.

Biden has leads in Arizona, Nevada and Maine with 82%, 79% and 69% of the precincts reporting, respectively. He also maintains the smallest of leads in Wisconsin with 49.3% of the vote to Trump's 49% with 89% of the ballots counted.

Biden picked up the very first votes counted on Election Day in Dixville Notch, N.H., where the entire town cast ballots for the former vice president, giving him five votes.

The former vice president spoke to supporters in Wilmington early Wednesday, urging them to be patient and to wait until "every vote is counted, every ballot is counted."

"We knew this was going to go long, but who knew we were going to go into maybe tomorrow morning or even longer," he said. "But look, we feel good about where we are. We really do."

About an hour and a half later with millions of votes still needing to be counted in key states, Trump called for the ballot-counting effort to stop, stating without explanation that he will be taking his complaint to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We want all voting to stop," he said.

The president also stopped short of prematurely and falsely claiming victory in the election, saying "as far as I'm concerned, we already won."

The press conference came after Trump published a tweet claiming "they are trying to STEAL the election" without giving specifics or evidence, which Twitter flagged for containing information that is "disputed and might be misleading" concerning the election.

Though local elections officials have released some results following the closure of polls, the final outcome of the election won't be official until states certify their counts in the coming days.

"It's not my place or Donald Trump's place to declare the winner of the election," Biden tweeted early Wednesday. "It's the voters' place."

Some, such as Pennsylvania, may not report large chunks of their results for days because they'll be counting an abnormally large number of mail-in ballots driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic. Early in the vote-counting process, states are expected to trend toward Trump and then move closer to Biden as mail-in ballots are counted.