As America waits to see who won the presidential election, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said “we definitely could” know the winner in the Keystone State Thursday.
But at a news conference Thursday night, Boockvar said the count is going to continue into the night. You can watch the news conference below or here.
“They’ll keep counting into the evening,” Boockvar said. “Stay tuned.”
Boockvar said, “we’re in a very good place with the mail-in and absentee ballots.”
“Because it’s a close race, we’re not quite clear who the winner is,” Boockvar said.
Boockvar said the count is proceeding faster than anticipated.
In a CNN interview this afternoon, Boockvar said the overwhelming majority of the remaining vote count should be finished Thursday. With 20 electoral votes, Pennsylvania remains the biggest outstanding prize in the presidential election.
“It’s looking like we’ll have the overwhelming majority counted by today,” Boockvar said on CNN. When asked if it’s possible the winner could be known in Pennsylvania, she said, “I think we definitely could.”
President Donald Trump is leading former Vice President Joe Biden in Pennsylvania but the gap is closing. As of 5 p.m. Thursday, Trump leads Biden by about 90,000 votes. There are about 340,000 mail-in ballots remaining to be counted. The vast majority of the ballots cast by mail came from registered Democrats.
Biden has a lead in electoral votes and a win in Pennsylvania could give him the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidential election. A Trump victory in the Keystone State would help sustain his hopes of a second term, though the president is trailing in other key states, including Arizona and Nevada.
At the news conference Thursday night, Boockvar said the number of ballots arriving after the polls closed is “a significantly lower number than we thought.” Citing delays in mail delivery, the state is planning to count ballots that arrive by 5 p.m. Friday.
Boockvar didn’t cite a specific number statewide but said some larger counties had received hundreds of late-arriving ballots, while some smaller counties hadn’t received any. But she said it looks to be less than the 60,000 ballots that arrived in the three days after the primary in June.
“It’s not going to be anywhere near that,” Boockvar said.
The state has directed the counties to count the late-arriving ballots separately, due to a legal challenge filed with the U.S. Supreme Court. The Trump campaign has joined that challenge. The high court chose not to act on an appeal before the election to exclude the late-arriving ballots, but the justices left open the possibility the appeal could be considered at a later date.
The Supreme Court rejected an earlier appeal to bar the counting of those ballots. But Republicans mounted a fresh appeal after newly seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court.
In the CNN interview, Boockvar said she didn’t expect the number of late-arriving ballots would be big enough to make a difference in the election, but those ballots will be counted separately just in case they don’t withstand the legal challenge.
Boockvar said counting in Philadelphia was paused briefly earlier amidst after a court ruling allowed Trump campaign officials to observe the vote counting. She said the count has resumed.
Allegheny County is pausing its count due to issues involving a ballot printing mishap.
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