Pennsylvania counties expected to turn corner in mailed ballot count Friday

Counties had 175,880 mailed ballots left to count late Thursday, but had yet to begin sorting out late-arriving, provisional and military ballots.

• Emily Previti
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  Emily Previti covered election security and voting procedure in Pennsylvania for WITF and PA Post.

Be patient: Results of the Nov. 3 election in Pennsylvania, and across the country, likely won’t be known for days. Here’s how WITF’s newsroom is covering the process.

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(Harrisburg) — The presidential race in Pennsylvania is still too close to call, with just 22,473 votes separating the candidates late Thursday.

At that point, counties had more than 163,501 mailed ballots in hand left to be tallied – plus another 470,239 ballots that are unaccounted for and still could end up figuring into results.

The majority of those outstanding ballots were requested in the Democratic strongholds of Allegheny County and Philadelphia and its suburbs, according to a WITF analysis of data from the Pennsylvania Department of State.

Some of those ballots might never be cast, but others could arrive by mail in time for Friday’s deadline – or belong to voters who went to the polls on Election Day to vote in-person provisionally.

Some counties’ election directors indicated they won’t know how many provisionals were cast until the weekend.

But others already had numbers to share ranging between 149 in Fulton County to 5,555 in Lancaster.

Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar noted Thursday that processing provisionals is one of the last steps in the vote count.

“A huge majority of in-person votes have been counted. We’re in a very good place with the mail and absentee ballots, but not quite there yet. Then there are still going to be provisional ballots, the military and overseas ballots and so forth,” Boockvar said. “The closer the races, the longer it takes.”

Provisionals are time-consuming to process because election workers must determine whether to count each one. That includes making sure the voter hasn’t already cast a mailed ballot.

Provisional ballots also are at the heart of a lawsuit due in court Friday morning. Republican Congressman Mike Kelly is the lead plaintiff on the case initiated earlier this week. It seeks to block provisionals cast by voters because they originally submitted mailed ballot had a disqualifying error flagged by their local county election office.

The state Republican party is also has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to disqualify mailed ballots counties received after Election Day; President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign filed a motion this week to join the Pa. GOP in that case. The court declined to expedite the matter before the election, but could decide at any time to take it up.

Right now, counties must accept ballots received between 8 p.m. Tuesday and 5 p.m. Friday as per a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision filed in mid-September. DoS has advised counties to separate those late-arriving ballots due to the SCOTUS litigation.