Waiting for Pa.: Biden closing quickly on Trump as counting continues

HARRISBURG — Joe Biden is closing quickly in Pennsylvania.

The former vice president and Democratic challenger pulled to within about 22,000 votes of President Donald Trump as of 6 a.m. Friday. Trump leads 3,285,048 (49.6%) to 3,262,575 (49.26%), but the lead precipitously dropped throughout the day Thursday as mail ballots continued to be tallied.

As of 12:32 a.m. Friday, about 163,000 mail ballots still needed to be counted, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State. That’s about 6.2% of the 2.6 million mail ballots cast.

Of those total mail ballots, about 65% came from a registered Democrat.

More than 35,000 ballots cast in Allegheny County will not be counted until at least Friday, and county officials estimate there could be thousands more provisional ballots in boxes that have not yet been opened. In a county that leans largely Democratic, that could go a long way in closing the gap further.

“The closer the race is, the longer it takes,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar said earlier Thursday evening. “We actually already have counted the overwhelming majority of ballots. But because it’s a close race, it’s not quite clear yet who the winner is.”

Boockvar again doubled down on the security of voting by mail.

“Even though it’s new … it’s the same processes we’ve used for decades for absentee voting,” she said. “We have very strong processes in place that make sure that voting integrity and security are constantly followed by every county in the state.”

She noted that even after the mail-in ballots are counted — and those are ballots that were received on or before Election Day but could not be counted before 7 a.m. Tuesday — the state will still need to process provisional ballots, military and overseas ballots, and ballots received by mail before 5 p.m. Friday but postmarked by Tuesday.

Trump scored a legal victory Thursday morning as a state appeals court granted more access to party and candidate observers, allowing them to get closer — 6 feet away — to election workers processing mail-in ballots in Philadelphia.

The city filed an appeal with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, citing concerns over worker safety amid the coronavirus pandemic and the potential for intimidation.

The Trump campaign had sued after complaining that its observer could not get close enough to election workers to see the writing on mail-in ballot envelopes, to ensure that the envelope contains a signature and an eligible voter’s name and address.

Ballots without that kind of information could be challenged or disqualified. A Philadelphia judge had turned down the Trump campaign’s complaint, saying that observers are allowed by law to watch, not audit.

The Trump campaign told the state’s high court that “candidates have the absolute right to observe the process” in Philadelphia, saying the city was depriving its observers of the ability to detect violations of election law.

It was unclear whether any of the legal challenges would make a difference to an eventual outcome.

Bob Bauer, a Biden campaign adviser, said the Trump campaign lawsuits don’t have any merit and are designed to spread misinformation, disrupt vote counting and confuse the public.

“It is to create an opportunity to message falsely about what’s happening the electoral process,” Bauer said.

Wolf accused Republicans of seeking to undermine confidence in the election results, and Boockvar said the state has acted legally and properly to ensure a complete and accurate count. More than 2.6 million mail-in ballots were cast, and there has been no report of fraud or any other problem with the accuracy of the count.

Appearing on “CBS This Morning,” state Attorney General Josh Shapiro — also a Democrat and seeking reelection in a race that has not yet been called — said the count “may be going a little slow, but it’s going very, very smooth.”

He added: “I recognize everybody’s on edge. … Everybody wants to know and the best thing we can do is get an accurate count and make sure that these legal votes are counted and that’s exactly what’s happening here in Pennsylvania.”