The vote counting for about 7,000 ballots remaining from a batch of 29,000, part of an October printing mishap, has been halted and will resume on Monday at 9 a.m.
According to Allegheny County communications director Amie Downs, additional administrative work needs to be done on those remaining ballots in the meantime.
“We are giving the staff food and sending them home,” said Downs at about 2 p.m. Saturday. “These last sets of ballots have a lot of nuances, so there is a lot of administrative work that needs to be done before we can move forward on anything.”
Some 17,000 provisional ballots also remain to be counted but will not be addressed until Tuesday at the earliest, Downs said.
“The sense of urgency hasn’t gone way, but because the process is so important, we don’t want to screw it up,” Downs said. “We want to make sure that every vote that should be, is counted.”
Allegheny County’s Return Board scanned an additional 7,200 ballots Saturday morning at the county’s elections warehouse on Pittsburgh’s North Side, bringing the total number of ballots to 702,315 in Allegheny County.
Joe Biden received an additional 5,184 votes to Trump’s 1,893.
Biden leads Trump by about 143,600 votes in Allegheny County. That was up from Biden’s lead of Friday night of about 138,400 votes.
Workers resumed counting votes in Allegheny County on Saturday morning, as an anxious nation awaited a winner to be declared.
The Associated Press and a slew of other news organizations called the race for Biden before noon.
The remaining 7,000 ballots in Allegheny County came from a batch of 29,000, all received on or before Election Day that were part of an October printing mishap by Midwest Direct, the Ohio vendor with which the county contracted for ballot printing and mailing.
Provisional ballots are ballots cast at the polls for myriad reasons on Election Day. Those include if a voter goes to the wrong polling place, they were asked to show ID and didn’t have it, or they completed a mail-in ballot that was rejected but believe they are still eligible to vote.
Provisional ballots that fall into the last category are the subject of a Commonwealth Court order that dictated county elections boards to set aside ballots that meet these criteria: it is a provisional ballot cast on election day and it was cast to replace a rejected mail-in or absentee ballot.
