© Cesar Perez/AFP/Getty ImagesDaniel Ortega speaking next to his wife and vice-president, Rosario Murillo, during a TV broadcast from Managua, Nicaragua.
In the early hours of Monday, Nicaragua's supreme electoral council said Ortega, a one-time revolutionary who has governed continuously since 2007, had received 75% of votes, with about half of the 1.3m ballots counted.
During a rare public appearance on Sunday, Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla who helped defeat the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s, painted the election as a choice between the peace and economic stability he claimed to offer and the conflict, chaos and "terror" of the opposition.
"This is a historic battle," declared the 75-year-old Sandinista, who was seeking re-election alongside his influential vice-president and wife, Rosario Murillo.
Critics, however, said the election, which followed a punishing six-month crackdown on Nicaragua's fractured opposition in which all of Ortega's main challengers were detained, was a sham.
"The arbitrary imprisonment of nearly 40 opposition figures since May, including seven potential presidential candidates, and the blocking of political parties from participation rigged the outcome well before election day," Biden said in a statement on Sunday.
"Long unpopular and now without a democratic mandate, the Ortega and Murillo family now rule Nicaragua as autocrats, no different from the Somoza family that Ortega and the Sandinistas fought four decades ago," he added, vowing to use "all diplomatic and economic tools at our disposal to support the people of Nicaragua".
Comment: First thing first. Biden may have said those words, but even stringing a coherent sentence together from a teleprompter is a success for him. This message is really from his handlers and those who pull the stings in global events. Their interests have nothing to do with supporting the people of Nicaragua and everything to do with sowing and spreading chaos in Latin America.
See: History tells us the United States' supposed 'concern for democracy' in Nicaragua is nothing of the sort
The centre-left president of neighbouring Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado Quesada, said his country would not recognise the result and called for the release of Nicaragua's political prisoners and negotiations that might lead to the re-establishment of democracy.
Spain's government rejected the elections as "a mockery" that did not reflect the genuine will of the Nicaraguan people and accused Ortega of imposing "a repressive and authoritarian regime" on the Central American country.
The European Union said the anti-democratic election completed "the conversion of Nicaragua into an autocratic regime".
Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called western calls to reject the election result "unacceptable" while Venezuela's foreign minister, Felix Plasencia, hailed what he called a "historic day of democracy" in Nicaragua.
Experts believe Ortega's determination to win, whatever the reputational damage, reflected his fear of losing power and being prosecuted for alleged crimes against humanity as a result of a deadly 2018 crackdown on student-led protests in which more than 300 people were killed.
"He has shown that political survival outweighs any possible internal or external pressure. It was a matter of life or death for him to ensure re-election on Sunday," said Tiziano Breda, a Central America specialist at Crisis Group.
Comment: More lies from so-called experts. The National Endowment for Democracy led an unsuccessful coup against Ortega with 54 projects to overthrow Ortega from 2013-2017, with the 2018 failed coup being the culmination of their efforts. Students were used as pawns and provocateurs were inserted at protests who fired at police. The formula is well known across the global chess board.
See: Goebbels is alive in Nicaragua: The relentless US lies and subterfuge are set against one of the most successful countries in Central America
Unsurprisingly, the US is refusing to recognize the results and last week laid out their plan to destroy Nicaragua's economy because reality hasn't conformed to their delusions. From Sputnik: