US Presidential election results on knife-edge

100 million Americans voted early in the US presidential election triggering the highest turnout in more than a century after the keenly contested and heated race for the White House.

In 2016 a record of 139 million votes was cast which represented 59.2 per cent of the eligible American voting population.

Mr Biden visited his childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and signed his name on the wall with the message “From his house to the White House with the Grace of God”.

Mr  Donald Trump (74), is seeking to avoid becoming the first incumbent president to lose a re-election fight since George HW Bush in 1992, has defied the pre-election polls to do better than predicted said “Winning is easy, losing is never easy, not for me it’s not”.

Joe Biden accompanied by his wife Jill speaks to supporters in Wilmington, Delaware, and said “We Knew this was going to go long, but who knew we would go into maybe tomorrow morning, maybe even longer!”.

To be elected president, a candidate must win at least 270 votes in what is called the electoral college as each US state gets a certain number of votes partly based on its population, and there is a total of 538 up for grabs.

The president is projected to have held the must-win state of Florida which has 29 electoral votes, but Biden snatched Arizona, once a reliably conservative state.

Pennsylvania is considered a must-win for Mr. Trump if he is to stave off defeat and keep hold of Ohio and Missouri known as bellwether states because they have so often predicted the eventual winner. 

Mr. Biden has already made history by winning more votes than any other US presidential candidate as he has more than 72 million votes, the previous record being 69.4 million votes won by Barack Obama in 2008.