Election 2020 updates: Biden warns of 'dark winter,' pushes masks in pandemic plan

Trump campaign surrogates Pam Bondi, former Florida Attorney General, and Corey Lewandowski appeared Thursday evening in the middle of dueling protests outside the Philadelphia Convention Center to say they had filed a lawsuit in federal court meant to immediately stop the Philadelphia vote count. 

The court, "in light of the Parties' agreement," denied without prejudice, the Trump campaign's request.

The federal lawsuit alleged that the Philadelphia County Board of Elections is "intentionally refusing to allow any representatives and poll watchers for President Trump and the Republican Party" from properly observing the vote, disobeying an earlier order. 

"They have refused to let us have meaningful -- a meaningful view of the vote count," Bondi said Thursday evening. "They are not letting us look at anything at all, nothing. So we have filed in federal court. We have just filed a motion in federal court for immediate injunctive relief to shut down the voting process until -- until we can get a resolution where we can look at these ballots."

-ABC News' Matthew Mosk and Alex Hosenball

ABC News Senior National Correspondent Terry Moran pushed back on some of Trump's remarks at the White House on ABC News Live Prime. 

"What he wants to demonstrate is that all these people are somehow engaged in a massive fraud," Moran said. "And to do that you need real evidence. This is not a reality TV show. This is an American election. You need evidence to back up those kinds of charges."

In his remarks, the president alleged widespread voter fraud without evidence and cast doubt on the votes that were still being counted.

Moran also discussed ballots that are still being counted, noting that most of the vote numbers we see now are votes that were cast on or before Election Day.

"We're talking about a reality that's in the past, that the counters are uncovering, like dirt off a fossil," he said. "The fossil is already there. They're scraping the dirt off it."

Trump Thursday evening falsely declared victory again, claiming, "If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us."

Trump has 214 electoral votes while Biden has 253. Biden's count includes Wisconsin, where ABC News is characterizing him as the apparent winner because the vote is very close and has not yet been certified.

Trump baselessly made claims of "historic election interference from big media, big money, and big tech."

The president also slammed mail-in voting, calling it "a corrupt system."

"It's really destroyed our system," Trump said. "They want to find out how many votes they need and then they seem to be able to find them. They wait and wait and then they find them and you see that on election night."

More Democrats have voted by mail. Many mail-in ballots are still being counted so they are added to totals after election night.

"It's amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided," Trump said.

"They are trying to steal an election. They are trying to rig an election and we can't let that happen," Trump added.

His repeated claims of widespread voter fraud are unsubstantiated, experts have said.

Trump baselessly blamed "the corrupt Democrat machine." He called out Detroit and Philadelphia, calling them "two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country," and said they "cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race, a very important presidential race."

"We think we will win the election very easily," Trump said. "We think there's going to be a lot of litigation because we have so much evidence, so much proof and it's going to end up perhaps at the highest court in the land."

Trump spoke for 17 minutes and did not take any questions.

Trump's lead is narrowing in Georgia. The president is now ahead by only 9,426 votes as more results are reported from Fulton County, home to most of Atlanta.

Trump now has 49.5% or 2,439,925 votes, while Biden has 49.3% or 2,430,499 votes.

Still not reported are roughly 17,000 ballots from Chatham County, which is home to the Democratic-leaning city of Savannah.

-ABC News' Quinn Scanlan