Biden campaign adviser Bob Bauer said "America should have faith in the voting process" and the count must continue until all the votes were tallied.

He accused President Trump of "specious claims", and said "we are going to defend the vote".

Joe Biden's campaign team is giving an update on the state of the race as the Democratic challenger waits to see if he has dislodged Donald Trump from the White House in this knife-edge election.

The campaign said it believed it was on a "clear path to victory". "We think that this is already a foregone conclusion," said campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon.

The outcome of the election now hangs on results from a few key states: Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Millions of votes remain uncounted and no candidate can credibly claim victory as yet.

Trump said earlier he had won and vowed to launch a Supreme Court challenge, alleging fraud without offering evidence.

Image source, Getty Images

It was a long night for vote-watchers, but a longer one still for those counting.

And now they're back at work in Wisconsin, according to the local Elections Commission.

"Our municipal and county clerks have worked tirelessly throughout the night to make sure every valid ballot is counted and reported accurately. Those unofficial results are available on the county clerks’ websites, external," said Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin’s chief election official.

Staff will be assisting clerks as they start the process of "triple-checking the results", she added.

Wisconsin is one of the states in the industrial Midwest which shocked pollsters by voting for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. This year it's considered a major battleground.

In 2016, the state’s 10 electoral votes put Trump over the top for the 270 votes he needed to win the presidency. It was tight - Trump won by just 0.7%.

Image source, Getty Images

More than 160 million Americans voted in the presidential election, producing the highest turnout rate in 120 years, according to preliminary estimates from the US Elections Project, external.

At 66.9%, the turnout rate of the voting-eligible population was the highest since 1900, the website’s data indicates.

That year, Republican President William McKinley defeated his Democratic challenger, William Jennings Bryan, on a turnout of 73.7%. Unlike 2020's election, 1900's produced a clear-cut result.

“The 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout rate in 120 years,” the founder of the US Elections Project, professor Michael McDonald, tweeted on Wednesday, external.

“There is still a fair amount of guesswork involving outstanding ballots to be counted. I will continue to refine these estimates over the coming weeks.”

This year, election observers had predicted a high turnout driven in part by a surge in mail-in ballots and early voters mindful of the threat posed by coronavirus. More than 100 million people, a record, voted early, it has been estimated.

The turnout in recent years has hovered around the 60% mark, as you can see here:

Image source, EPA

European stock markets are volatile as uncertainty continues over the outcome of the US election.

Indexes in London, Paris and Frankfurt opened sharply lower after incumbent President Donald Trump vowed to launch a Supreme Court challenge.

However, they had recovered by mid-morning, trading higher on the day before zigzagging again.

All three were in positive territory by lunchtime, with the dollar up against the pound but down against the euro.

On Tuesday, the three major US indexes closed higher, with the Dow up more than 2%.

Read more here.

Twitter has flagged a post by Slovenia's Prime Minister, Janez Jansa, in which he congratulates Donald Trump and accuses the "mainstream media" of "facts denying".

His post has been labelled by Twitter with a line saying: "Official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted."

Jansa has consistently tweeted his support for Trump and his policies since becoming Slovenia's prime minister in March.

As we've mentioned, many votes in key states remain uncounted and neither Trump nor Biden can credibly claim victory yet.

James Landale
Diplomatic correspondent

How much is democracy itself now at stake in the US, not just the occupancy of the White House?

The UK's former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt thinks it is. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that an argument about process and talk of stolen elections would put a smile on the face of Presidents Putin of Russia and Xi of China.

They, Hunt said, would look at their own people and say "aren't you pleased you haven't got this mess?"

Democracy is, of course, challenged globally by a Chinese superpower that espouses a different ideology, in which economic freedom is not matched by political liberty. But democracy is also increasingly challenged from within by politicians and voters if they no longer accept the rules of the game.

In the US, Donald Trump talks today of fraud and Supreme Court challenges. In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, opposition parties say parliamentary elections at the weekend were rigged. Last week's elections in Tanzania have also been disputed, prompting protests and a crackdown on opposition figures. The legitimacy of the August elections in Belarus is still being fought out on the streets of Minsk.

The US may be considered by many to be the world's oldest democracy, but if the legitimacy of its electoral system is called into question, then that will add to doubts about representative government elsewhere in the world.

Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has mocked pollsters who predicted that Joe Biden was going to win the US presidential election, as he held onto his seat in South Carolina.

"He's gonna win. To all the pollsters out there, you have no idea what you're doing," Graham said.

At this point in a very tight race, it's not clear if he'll be proved right or not.

Some would call it inhumane, or at least unwise - but as Americans went to the polls, we put 12 Biden voters and 13 Trump voters in a group chat for a virtual watch party.

The Democrats (D), Republicans (R) and Independents (I) all agreed that this election campaign has been "the race that never ends". But then the results began to come in, and tensions rose.

The group started buzzing when Trump took the lead in Florida. But not everyone shared the happiness.

The conversation that followed a few of the networks projecting Florida for Trump sent some weary and frustrated Democrats to bed.

See here for more interactions between our voters as the night went on.

In the US election, voters decide state-level contests rather than an overall, single, national one.

This race is still too close to call.

Donald Trump is projected to have won important states such as Florida, Ohio and Texas - but he will need to win several more key states to secure four more years. Biden still has several paths to victory, but none is guaranteed.

The crunch states that have yet to declare results:

• Arizona: Traditionally Republican but a key battleground this year. Biden is ahead with 83% of the vote counted and some US networks have projected victory for him already. We aren't able to do this yet
• Georgia: Another traditionally Republican state that has become a tight race this year. Trump is narrowly ahead at the moment, but ballots in Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs are still being counted
• Nevada: Biden is facing a tougher-than-expected fight here. He currently has a razor-thin lead
• Wisconsin: A major Midwestern battleground, it backed Democrats for over two decades before opting for Trump in 2016. Here, Biden has a narrow lead with almost all votes counted
• Michigan: The rivals are pretty much neck-and-neck here but many ballots in Democrat-leaning populated areas, like Detroit, are yet to be counted
• Pennsylvania: With 20 electoral college votes, it's a major political battleground. Trump has a significant lead, but a huge number of mail-in ballots are yet to be counted and a result is not expected until Friday. Legal challenges from the Republicans loom over the result here

Reality Check

Image source, Getty Images

British politician Nigel Farage – who supports President Trump – was speaking about the US election and told BBC News: “The evidence for voter fraud from postal voting is there for all to see, we know it ourselves on our side of the pond.”

So, what is the evidence?

In the US – as Reality Check has previously explained - while there have been isolated cases, numerous studies have shown it is very rare. The head of the Federal Electoral Commission Ellen Weintraub has said: “There's simply no basis for the conspiracy theory that voting by mail causes fraud."

Farage – when challenged – admitted that there was “no evidence of fraud at this stage” in this US election.

When it comes to the UK (“our side of the pond”), the Electoral Commission says there is no evidence of large-scale electoral fraud in the UK.

In 2019 there were three convictions for electoral fraud and one individual accepted a police caution.

In 2018 there was one conviction and two cautions, while in 2017 there was one conviction and eight cautions., external

Of those cases, four of the cautions involved postal ballots.

As the polls closed last night, US voters shared how they feel about their candidate's prospects.

Democrats dreamed of blocking Trump's path to the White House by winning Florida.

But with almost all the votes counted, Trump has been projected to win the close-fought state, with 51% of the vote compared with Biden's 48%.

The president gained two points on his victory in the state in 2016. Biden, meanwhile, failed to improve upon the tally recorded by Hillary Clinton in the last presidential election.

Exit poll estimates put the president on a 61% share of the white vote in Florida.

Biden appears to have made up ground on Clinton's performance with this demographic in 2016. But Trump is estimated to have gained 12 points among Latino voters, bringing him nearly level with Biden among that sizeable group.

Looking at the split by age, Biden appears to have won an increased share of the vote among seniors.

But that gain has been offset by losses in the 30-44 age group, where Trump is up 11 points on last time.

Natalie Higgins
BBC News, Brussels

Image source, Getty Images

European leaders have remained largely tight-lipped this morning, waiting for the result.

But even that "too soon to say" approach is an implicit rejection of President Trump’s claim of victory and call to stop the counting.

The EU's chief diplomat, Josep Borrell, offered what he described as a personal view. Every vote needed to be counted in such a tight race, he said: “No one can claim to be the winner yet because there is no data to support that.”

A European Commission spokesperson echoed that it was an ongoing process: “We will abide by whatever announcement is forthcoming officially from the relevant US authorities and we feel that everyone should do likewise.”

But beyond this city of diplomats, one EU leader was firmly backing President Trump. Twitter added a warning message to a tweet by Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, in which he alleged it was “pretty clear” that the president had been re-elected and criticised “more delays and facts denying from mainstream media”.

We still don’t know who has won the presidential election, with nine states yet to project results.

What we do know, however, is that President Trump appears to have performed much better than some pre-election polls had suggested.

An average of polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics, external gave Biden a +0.9 lead in Florida, a swing state which Trump has been projected to win.

Some polls were similarly off the mark ahead of the 2016 election. As Americans digest this year’s results, pollsters are drawing criticism once again.

Trump’s former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told the BBC the polls had been "flat out wrong" in states like Texas. Meanwhile Nigel Farage, Brexit Party leader and Trump ally, said the results so far appeared to "confound the pollsters".

So, did Trump wrong-foot the pollsters for a second time?

Image source, Reuters

The Trump vote was "massively underestimated" in some states, said political strategist Denise Baron.

"There’s clearly something happening there," she said, even though "major efforts were made between 2016 and this year to get a more accurate view of different types of voters".

For example, some polls were adjusted to take into account any distortions caused by the educational background of respondents.

"Clearly they’ve missed out on something."

Vitaliy Shevchenko
BBC Monitoring

For Russian TV, the main question is not who is the better candidate – either for the US or Russia. The Kremlin media machine’s main message to the people of Russia is that America is in chaos, that its democracy is failing and - most importantly - that it is in no position to teach others what is right and what is wrong.

This morning, the state-owned, rolling-news TV channel Rossiya 24 has been airing lengthy no-comment videos of people shouting and fighting in the street. The US election is “madness”, it said. NTV, one of Russia’s most-watched television stations, also spoke of “expectations of unrest”.

Image source, Rossiya 24

But pro-Kremlin TV has also made its preferences clear: Donald Trump is usually given uncritical coverage and portrayed as a David fighting the Goliath of a hostile establishment and media bias.

Accusations of corruption and sexual misconduct against Joe Biden’s son Hunter are reported unquestioningly, and are said to have everything to do with his father.

The Democrats’ response? According to state TV’s Channel One, it was the new Borat film, which – it said - was released to smear Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Image source, Reuters

With 99% of votes counted, Democratic challenger Joe Biden has taken a slim lead (about 20,000 votes right now) over President Donald Trump in the Midwestern industrial state of Wisconsin.

Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin by less than 30,000 votes back in 2016 in a major upset.

Despite Biden's slim lead, the race remains too close to be projected.

Wisconsin could be pivotal in determining who wins the White House.

BBC Radio 5 Live

Biden voter Amna, in London, told BBC Radio 5 Live she felt “very sad” to wake up this morning and hear Donald Trump making an unfounded claim about electoral fraud.

“I made sure to send it [my vote from abroad] in in time," she said. "Our soldiers vote from abroad. It’s made me feel very sad.

“I really hope that going forward as a country, whoever wins, we can start to bring unity and almost peace. I’m starting to lose hope."

Listen live on BBC Sounds.

Katya Adler
Europe Editor

Germany’s defence minister described the situation in the US as explosive this morning, expressing concern the country could descend into a constitutional crisis.

An increasing number of leading European politicians are using this election as an argument for Europe to “take its destiny into its own hands”, as former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt put it - or in the words of France’s Europe minister, not to look to US election results to decide Europe’s fate.

Image source, Getty Images

Four years of President Trump have done enormous damage to US-EU relations: diplomatic, trade, foreign policy, security, tech, climate and more.

But Europe’s leaders aren’t arguing for the continent to go it alone entirely. They readily admit the importance of the transatlantic friendship. Most are silently hoping Joe Biden will win. Yet there’s also a realisation that a Biden presidency, while likely different in tone to President Trump's, might not heal growing transatlantic rifts. And that, whoever ends up in the White House, especially after this fraught vote, their primary focus will almost inevitably be domestic – not overseas relations.

Exit poll data from across the US has given a glimpse into voters' priorities and an indication of how different demographic groups have cast their ballots.

Nationally, more than a third of voters said the economy was the most important issue in deciding whom to choose as president, with a further two in 10 naming racial inequality and 17% saying the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the issues were split along partisan lines with more than four times as many Trump voters saying the economy was the deciding factor, and Biden voters answering racial inequality and the virus.

Voters were evenly split on how the US economy was faring, with 48% saying it was in "excellent or good" condition and 50% saying it was "not so good or poor".

Similarly, 50% said that the US was doing "somewhat or very badly" at containing the pandemic and 48% thought the country was doing "somewhat or very well".

The possibility of voter fraud has been raised repeatedly by the Trump campaign, but a large majority of voters (87%) told the researchers they were confident that votes in their state would be counted accurately.