Americans will have to wait at least another day to learn the results of the 2020 presidential election after officials in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County confirmed that it has paused the counting of ballots. The county will resume counting the remaining 35,000 ballots on Friday. According to a New York Times election results map, Pennsylvania, Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s home state, is currently leaning in favor of President Donald Trump, who holds 50.3% of the counted vote, though mail-in ballots are believed to favor Biden. It had long been expected that a final tally, and the winner of the state, would not be declared until Friday.
According to reporter Chris Potter, the delay in counting the ballots is due to the fact that the remaining ballots “require special attention.” Of the more than 35,000 ballots left to be counted, approximately 29,000 of them “involve a situation where a vendor sent the wrong ballots to voters,” meaning that new ballots had to be reissued. Due to this, “some voters now have 2 ballots, one w/wrong races.” Such ballots, according to Potter, must be given “special scrutiny” to ensure that voters do not cast two ballots and that, in the scenario, they send in a single ballot, they do not vote in races they are not eligible to vote in.
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Here I am going to try to address some confusion about why Allegheny County is not going to begin counting 30,000+ ballots until tomorrow. People are going bonkers about this, or castigating hard-working employees on no sleep, and it is wrong. (thread)
— Chris Potter (@CPotterPgh) November 5, 2020
Potter noted that other ballots that remain to be counted included those “that don’t scan.” According to WXPI.com, incomplete ballots and ones that were damaged in the mail are also included in the number. The County Return Board is expected to go through these ballots beginning on Friday, though Trip Gabriel reported that election staff would begin “addressing some of these issues in its ‘administrative work’ today.”
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Allegheny County Election Division Manager David Voye said that as of around 10:45 p.m. Wednesday night, the county had scanned approximately 668,000 ballots. Those ballots included around 313,000 mail-in ballots and 340,000 in-person ballots from Election Day voters. The Return Board will begin the examination of the remaining uncounted ballots at 9 a.m. Friday.
