PRESIDENT Trump has accused Joe Biden of trying to ‘steal’ the US Election.

Hours earlier, Mr Biden offered reassurances that the counting could be trusted, projecting a more presidential appearance while urging patience from Americans.

Mr Trump said that there had been a series of electoral misconduct and said that the counting of votes submitted before and on Election Day must cease.

His claims came as it emerged a 118-year-old voter in Wayne County, Michigan was sent an Absentee ballot to vote in the 2020 Presidential Election, only the voter died in 1984, official social security records reveal.

William Bradley was registered to vote by absentee ballot and Trump supporters say he voted in the 2020 Election – yet data from the US Social Security administration confirms Bradley died in 1984.

Mr Trump has pursued legal options with little success, working the phones and escalating efforts to sow doubt about the outcome of the race.

Red voters in Arizona have also claimed they were ‘duped’ into using Sharpie markers on their ballots in the Presidential Election on November 3rd, leading to the votes being invalidated at counts, according to multiple reports across the state.

One video on Twitter revealed voters had been offered Sharpies in Polling Places across Arizona being offered sharpies by Election staff.

He was back on Twitter in the early hours of the morning, insisting the “U.S. Supreme Court should decide!”.

During a press conference since election night, Mr Trump said: “This is a case when they are trying to steal an election, they are trying to rig an election,” Mr Trump. 

Mr Biden took a different tack, speaking briefly to reporters after attending a Covid-19 briefing to declare that “each ballot must be counted”.

“I ask everyone to stay calm. The process is working,” said Mr Biden. “It is the will of the voters. No one, not anyone else who chooses the president of the United States of America.”

Mr Biden’s victories in Michigan and Wisconsin have put him in a commanding position, but Mr Trump showed no sign of giving up. It could take several more days for the vote count to conclude and a clear winner emerge.

With millions of ballots yet to be tabulated, Mr Biden already had received more than 72 million votes, the most in history.

Mr Trump’s campaign engaged in a flurry of legal activity to try to improve the Republican president’s chances, requesting a recount in Wisconsin and filing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

Statewide recounts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote tally by only a few hundred votes. Mr Biden led by more than 20,000 ballots out of nearly 3.3 million counted.

Judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly dismissed Trump campaign lawsuits there on Thursday.

Mr Biden has already won Michigan and Wisconsin. The contests in Georgia and Pennsylvania, along with Nevada and North Carolina, were tight with votes still being tabulated.

The Trump campaign said it was confident the president would ultimately pull out a victory in Arizona, where votes were also still being counted, including in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous area. 

The Associated Press declared Mr Biden the winner in Arizona, but the states result is too close to call. 

Mr Trump’s legal challenges faced long odds. He would have to win multiple suits in multiple states in order to stop vote counts, since more than one state was undeclared.

There were no obvious grounds for the Justice Department to attempt to intervene to stop a vote count at the state level, unless the federal government could somehow assert a violation of federal voting laws or the Constitution.

The department could theoretically file a brief in support of a Trump campaign lawsuit if it believed there were federal concerns at stake, but that intervention would be extraordinary.

While Mr Trump has insisted that ballot counting stop, it was unclear exactly what that would include.

Counting for votes received by November 3 was continuing, but roughly 20 states allow ballots to be counted if postmarked by November 3 but received in the days afterwards.

In some states that is as long as nine days, or even longer. Some of the deadline changes were made as a result of the pandemic, but others are merely routine parts of state election laws. Mr Trump has fixated on Pennsylvania, where the Supreme Court refused to stop a court’s ruling that allowed for a three-day extension.

He also said he was taking fraud claims to court – but most of the lawsuits only demand better access for campaign observers to locations where ballots are being processed and counted.

A judge in Georgia dismissed the campaign’s suit there less than 12 hours after it was filed. And a Michigan judge dismissed a Trump lawsuit over whether enough GOP challengers had access to handling of absentee ballots

Biden attorney Bob Bauer said the suits were legally “meritless”. Their only purpose, he said “is to create an opportunity for them to message falsely about what’s taking place in the electoral process”.

Additional Reporting by PA Media