Pennsylvania Won’t Finish Counting Absentee Ballots Until Friday at the Earliest

The key battleground state of Pennsylvania did not begin processing absentee ballots until Election Day morning, which means state election officials may only reach a final count by Friday at the earliest.

ABC News explains:

When Pennsylvania approved so-called “no-excuse” absentee mail ballots last fall — meaning any voter can request one without citing a reason — the law didn’t allow officials to begin canvassing mail ballots until polls close on election night, according to Lisa Schaefer, the executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania. […] Counties began lobbying lawmakers to give them more time to process ballots ahead of the pandemic. But their effort became more aggressive over the summer, after several counties struggled to quickly count the deluge of mail-in ballots in the June primary. […] But at least eight counties are reportedly planning to wait until Wednesday morning to start processing and counting mail in absentee ballots received before the election: Beaver, Cumberland, Franklin, Greene, Juniata, Mercer, Monroe, and Montour.

Both President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden made Pennsylvania a focal point of their campaigns in the final days of the election.

Trump said in an interview with FNC’s Fox & Friends that he believes Pennsylvania is one of several battleground states where he is performing strongly.

Earlier Tuesday, Biden’s campaign claimed in a curious statement that it could still win the general election without the Keystone State and Florida.

“While we believe we can win all four of them, and we are doing everything in our power to do that, we don’t need to win them and that’s a true luxury,” Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon said. “We don’t need to win any of these four big states in order to still get to 270 electoral votes.”

“I think we are going to do very well in Pennsylvania,” she stated. “We think we are doing very well everywhere. And it’s more than thinking. You know, we are seeing trends, and so you can tell this isn’t just like taking a poll. This is based on trends. And we think we are doing very well in states, a lot of states, really. A lot of states.”

Pennsylvania’s top election official recently said that mail-in ballots received by counties in the presidential battleground state within three days after polls close will count, although she also cautioned that more litigation could change that.

Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar also said, however, that those late-arriving ballots will be counted separately, for the sake of “effective and clear election administration in Pennsylvania.”

Boockvar had told counties on Wednesday to set those ballots aside and not count them. That was hours before the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a Republican Party bid to block a state court order granting the extended deadline for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.