WASHINGTON — Four key battleground states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia — began on Wednesday with tens of thousands of absentee ballots uncounted, leaving the White House race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden up in the air.
Election officials in some states called it a night and planned to resume the count in the morning, while some counties in Pennsylvania weren't even to start tabulating their mail-in votes until later Wednesday morning. The mail-in ballots, which smashed records this year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, are expected to favor Biden, whose campaign encouraged Democrats to vote early, while in-person votes on Election Day may have given Trump an advantage.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly called for results to be tallied quickly so that a winner could be declared on election night, though officials technically have days or weeks to complete official counts before state totals are certified. But in three key states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — election officials were not allowed to begin processing absentee ballots until on or just before Election Day, after Republican-led state legislatures successfully opposed changing laws to allow earlier preparations like other states.
After Biden gave remarks early Wednesday calling for patience while workers continued to count, Trump attacked the legitimate counting of votes and falsely claimed he had won in states where millions of ballots are yet to be counted. A Trump tweet claiming the election was being stolen from him was labeled by Twitter, "disputed and might be misleading."
In Pennsylvania, where officials couldn't begin processing hundreds of thousands of early ballots until Tuesday, counties made their own decisions about how to prioritize the crush.
Officials in Philadelphia had counted around 75,000 mail-in ballots out of 350,000 that had been returned by late Tuesday, with another chunk expected to be counted before officials stop for the night, said City Commissioner Al Schmidt. The city, a major Democratic stronghold, won't have an updated number on mail-in ballots until 9 a.m. ET, Lisa Deeley, head of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, said in a news conference early Wednesday morning.
Election workers in Luzerne County, a northeastern county near Scranton, stopped counting mail-in ballots on Tuesday evening and will resume Wednesday morning, according to county manager David Pedri. He said the county had counted about 26,000 mail-in ballots of roughly 60,000 cast.
Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, planned to count "24 hours a day until completion," according to county spokesperson Kelly Cofrancisco.
In Georgia, where rules allowed for pre-processing, major counties nevertheless reported backups and sent workers home rather than finish counting overnight.
By 10:30 p.m. ET Tuesday, Fulton — which is the state's largest county and includes Atlanta — had counted all in-person votes and stopped counting mail-in ballots for the evening. Officials there plan to resume counting the absentee ballots on Wednesday morning at 8, Fulton County spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt told CNN late Tuesday.
Fulton County, Atlanta's most populous, still has an estimated 48,118 absentee ballots left to count, and that doesn't count ballots received by mail on Tuesday. In neighboring DeKalb County, another Democratic stronghold, election officials there will count 79,000 absentee ballots by mail starting at 11 a.m. ET Wednesday.
Georgia ran into other issues too. A pipe burst early Tuesday morning at Atlanta's State Farm Arena above the processing room for all absentee ballots in Fulton County, delaying counting there, said county spokeswoman Regina Waller. No ballots were damaged, according to Waller.
A suspected problem with voting tabulation software has caused delays in the counting of as many as 80,000 mail-in ballots in Gwinnett County, which is east of Atlanta, according to a county spokesman. Officials believe the software erroneously identified flaws in the way voters filled out the ballots.
