HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania had hundreds of thousands of ballots left to count Thursday, but the state’s elections chief signaled the number was expected to dwindle rapidly as Democrat Joe Biden and President Donald Trump fought to the end for the White House.
Some of the state’s most heavily populated locales, including Montgomery and Chester counties in the Philadelphia suburbs, reported finishing their tallies. The counting continued in Philadelphia and in other counties throughout Pennsylvania two days after Election Day.
“It’s looking like we are ahead of schedule,” Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, an official in the administration of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, said on CNN Thursday. She added that “it is looking like we’ll have the overwhelming majority counted by today.”
The Trump campaign and the Republican Party mounted several legal challenges to aspects of the vote count, contending, for example, that GOP election observers were kept too far away from the tabulation in Philadelphia, that some Democratic-leaning counties unfairly allowed people to fix technical problems with their mail-in ballots, and that mail-in ballots arriving after Tuesday should not be counted.
Trump scored one legal victory as intermediate state appeals court on Thursday 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, the elections chief, 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.”
Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is, wrapped up the initial vote count but had to wait until Friday to tabulate more than 35,000 mail-in and absentee votes. The delayed count of 29,000 of those votes stemmed from an earlier glitch in involving voters who were initially mailed ballots with the wrong contests on them. The county issued corrected ballots but said it would review them to make sure they were counting only one ballot per voter.
Other ballots that will be reviewed include ones that couldn’t be scanned, or that were missing a date or had an illegible voter declaration, said county spokesperson Amie Downs.
___ Rubinkam reported from northeastern Pennsylvania. Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg and Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
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