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WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) – A Pennsylvania court ordered election officials Friday to set aside provisional ballots cast on Election Day by voters whose absentee or mailed ballots were received on time.
Those provisional ballots were to be separated until officials could determine whether they were validly cast, according to an order from the Commonwealth Court in a lawsuit brought by Republican candidates.
With ballots still being counted on Friday three days after the polls closed, Democratic challenger Joe Biden took a narrow lead over Republican President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. If the leadership holds, it would give Biden the presidency.
Republicans were challenging the guidance issued by Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar that allows “curing” defective vote-by-mail ballots by giving people the opportunity to submit provisional ballots. Republicans say the targeting violates state law.
In a separate Republican challenge seeking to block late-arriving vote-by-mail ballots in Pennsylvania, which is pending in the Supreme Court, Republicans asked justices to issue an order requiring the ballots in question to be set aside during the process. counting.
Boockvar had already said he would do so voluntarily, but Republicans said in the request that it is not “clear” whether all counties are complying. Late ballots are a small proportion of the overall vote in the state, Boockvar said.
Biden leads Trump from 49.5% to 49.3% in Pennsylvania, a difference of more than 13,500 votes, according to Edison Research, with 96% of the expected votes cast. Under Pennsylvania law, a recount is automatic if the margin of victory is less than or equal to 0.5 percentage point of the total vote.
In Philadelphia, the state’s largest city, about 40,000 ballots remained to be counted, most of them provisional and military, and the final count could take several days, election officials said.
(Reported by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware and Lawrence Hurley in Washington; edited by Chizu Nomiyama and Grant McCool)
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