Nov. 5 highlights: Vote counting goes on in battleground states

The president posted a series of tweets just after 2 a.m., pushing similarly misleading or false claims that he spread during a brief appearance at the White House on Thursday evening.

The president again cast doubt on the election process and expressed hope that the Supreme Court would invalidate votes that are being counted.

Some Republicans have distanced themselves from the president's attacks on the electoral system, while others have echoed his rhetoric.

NBC News' Jane Timm fact-checked some of the president's earlier claims. Check those here.

President Donald Trump, who had not spoken publicly since an early Wednesday morning address, delivered remarks Thursday evening about the state of the still-undecided presidential election that were largely false.

Click here for what Trump said from the White House, and the facts. 

Mary Trump, the president's niece, called him "desperate" and said he is "flailing" as the prospect of a Biden presidency inches closer.

"The damage he just did is incalculable," she told MSNBC in a Thursday night interview after he made baseless claims of fraud in the election and falsely declared victory in public remarks. "The public statements are an indication of how bad things are privately."

She said Republicans, many of whom have been reluctant to directly criticize the president, can only reign him in.

"Donald has never been in this place before where there's nobody to bail him out," she said. "He's flailing."

There has been record turnout in the 2020 election. Biden has received more than 73 million votes, the most of any candidate in American history. At roughly 70 million votes, Trump is in second place. But Mary Trump said her uncle will see it as a direct repudiation of him as Republicans gain House seats and may hold on to their Senate majority.

Republican lawmakers and officials are pushing back after President Donald Trump Thursday night delivered a series of false claims about the presidential election, though many did not mention him by name.

Shortly after Trump at a news conference made baseless claims about massive voter fraud in Pennsylvania, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said in a statement Thursday that once the state's final election count is "reached and certified, all parties involved must accept the outcome of the election regardless of whether they won or lost."

The harshest pushback came from retiring Texas Rep. Will Hurd.

"A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong, it undermines the very foundation this nation was built upon," he said in a tweet. "Every American should have his or her vote counted."

Click here for the full story.

While Trump's Nevada lawsuit hasn't come yet, the Trump campaign did file another suit in Pennsylvania with the Republican National Committee, arguing that some 600 ballots were being illegally counted in Montgomery County. 

Read more about the Trump legal battle here.

In two of the most hotly contested states in the country, Michigan and Wisconsin, President Trump lost despite winning a higher percentage of the vote than he did in 2016.

How can that happen?

Trump won 47.22 percent of the vote in Wisconsin in 2016. Hillary Clinton won 46.45 percent, and third party candidates combined with write-ins to account for about 6 percent of the vote. On Tuesday, with about 28,000 votes left to be counted, Trump had 48.8 percent of the vote. But Biden had 49.4 percent.

There was a similar dynamic in Michigan. Trump won 47.25 percent there in 2016, compared to Clinton's 47.03 percent. It was the closest finish in a state he won. In this year's election, he took 47.9 percent of Michigan votes. Biden won 50.5 percent.