President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have secured more than 80 million votes as absentee ballots continued to be counted Tuesday, making them the first presidential ticket in U.S. history to achieve this milestone.
The Cook Political Report on Tuesday indicated that Biden and Harris had gained roughly 51 percent of the popular vote with 80,033,996 ballots, while President Trump and Vice President Pence held about 47.1 percent with 73,878,907.
The news comes amid record voter turnout in the 2020 election, prior to which no presidential ticket had received more than 69.4 million votes, the record held by former President Obama during the 2008 presidential election.
Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman announced the news on Twitter based on absentee ballots counted by the Erie County, N.Y., Board of Elections.
Biden broke the 70 million vote threshold shortly after Election Day.
President Trump also beat a record for the most votes received for a losing presidential candidate with more than 70 million votes.
Major news outlets first called the race for Biden on Nov. 7 after a surge in absentee ballots led to delayed projections in key battleground states. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes put the former vice president over the edge to clinch the Electoral College victory.
According to projections from The Associated Press, Biden is expected to take 306 electoral votes, with Trump garnering 232.
Trump has repeatedly refused to concede the election, and his legal team launched a multistate legal battle challenging the results and claiming there were several cases of voter fraud and irregularities.
These claims have since been disputed by courts, and on Monday, Trump announced that he had ordered General Services Administration (GSA) head Emily Murphy to begin allowing the Biden transition team to have access to federal resources and services granted to facilitate the transition process.
Murphy has refused to ascertain Biden as the victor for weeks following the news of his projected election win.
On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) tweeted that the Pennsylvania Department of State certified the election results and he “signed the Certificate of Ascertainment for the slate of electors for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris” as required by law.
The certification came after a federal judge over the weekend tossed out the Trump campaign’s lawsuit challenging voting procedures in the Keystone State, saying that the accusations were “unsupported by evidence.”
On Monday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court also rejected a request by the Trump campaign to throw out ballots in the state that contained small technical errors.