Joe Biden’s campaign warned it has got its legal team ready if Donald Trump attempts to call the election before all ballots are counted in a ‘naked effort’ to take away voters’ democratic rights.

Campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon accused the president of ‘stripping Americans of their voice’, before hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes have been counted.

The race is almost neck-and-neck between the presidential rivals, with Biden slightly in the lead. The former vice president is currently at 238 electoral college votes, while Trump has 213 – at least 270 will secure a win.

Despite this, Trump wrongly claimed has already won and that a ‘very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise’ his votes. He vowed to take his case to the US Supreme Court to halt all vote-counting.

Officials have warned that mail-in votes would not be counted until late on Wednesday at the earliest and could take days for a result – leaving key states that could swing the vote, such as Pennsylvania, hanging in the balance.

The former vice president’s campaign vowed it will fight any legal efforts launched by Trump’s camp and that they ‘will prevail’.

Campaign manager O’Malley Dillon said: ‘If the president makes good on his threat to go to court to try to prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort.’

She continued: ‘It was outrageous because it is a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens.

‘It was unprecedented because never before in our history has a president of the United States sought to strip Americans of their voice in a national election.’

She insisted the ‘counting will not stop’ because that is what ‘our laws require’.

‘We repeat what the Vice President said tonight: Donald Trump does not decide the outcome of this election.

‘Joe Biden does not decide the outcome of this election. The American people decide the outcome of this election.

‘And the democratic process must and will continue until its conclusion.’

Trump has long been making unfounded claims about electoral fraud and yesterday claimed that ‘cheating can happen like you have never seen’ with mail-in ballots.

The US president, his family, and officials have used postal votes in past elections and there is no evidence to suggest it is open to fraud.

He threatened that any delay beyond election night will put the country in danger in an incendiary tweet which was quickly censored by Twitter and labelled as ‘misleading’.

Biden has captured 20 states including his home of Delaware and big prizes California and New York, as well as the US capital.

The former vice president has flipped one state won by Trump in 2016 – Arizona, in the southwest.

Nebraska split its electoral votes between the two – four for Trump and one for Biden.

Maine was won by Biden, but so far, he has only three of the four electoral votes on offer, with the last still to be decided.

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