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(CNN) – Four key states on the battlefield – Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia – began Wednesday with tens of thousands of votes absent without counting, leaving the race for the White House between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden in the air. .
Election officials in some states, including Nevada and Georgia, finished the night and planned to resume counting in the morning, while some Pennsylvania counties didn’t even begin tabulating their mail-in votes until Wednesday morning.
Mail-in ballots, which broke records this year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, are expected to favor Biden, whose campaign encouraged Democrats to vote early, while in-person voting on Election Day may have given him an advantage to Trump.
Visit CNN’s Elections Center for full coverage of the 2020 race
In three key states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, election officials were not allowed to start processing absentee ballots until or just before Election Day, after Republican-led state legislatures objected with success to change the laws to allow earlier preparations like other states.
After Biden spoke early Wednesday morning asking for patience as workers continued to count, Trump attacked legitimate vote counting and falsely claimed he had won in states where millions of ballots have yet to be counted.
The Republican National Committee has prepared for a full-scale legal battle that could come in a very fine contest in one of the key states. “We have thousands of volunteer attorneys and several law firms that are already hired in these battle states,” said RNC spokeswoman Mandi Merritt.
Democrats have also amassed their own legal army to fight any potential court battle.
Pennsylvania Count and Lawsuits
In Pennsylvania, where officials were unable to begin processing hundreds of thousands of ballots before Tuesday, counties made their own decisions about how to prioritize infatuation. As of Wednesday morning, there were still more than 1 million ballots to count in Pennsylvania, a state election official told CNN.
In Philadelphia’s main Democratic stronghold, where more than 350,000 mail-in ballots had been received, city officials still had hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots left to count on Wednesday morning, the city commissioner of Philadelphia, Al Schmidt, on CNN. He noted that Pennsylvania allows mail-in ballots to be received and counted through Friday.
“We will continue day and night until each one of those votes is counted,” Schmidt said.
Poll workers in Luzerne County, a northeastern county near Scranton, stopped counting mail-in ballots on Tuesday night and will resume on Wednesday morning, according to county administrator David Pedri. He said the county had counted about 26,000 mail-in ballots out of about 60,000 issued.
Democratic-leaning Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, planned to count “24 hours a day until completion,” according to county spokeswoman Kelly Cofrancisco.
Republicans have filed a lawsuit challenging at least 1,200 absentee ballots in Montgomery County. A federal judge will hear the challenge Wednesday morning.
Three Republicans who observed mail ballot processing described to a federal court how they viewed absentee ballots with potential technical problems and believed that election officials might impermissibly try to give voters a chance to fix problem ballots that would have provoked his rejection. Republicans alleged the county had started processing mail ballots too early and was illegally trying to allow voters to correct defects, such as adding missing inner envelopes.
Also in Pennsylvania, Republican Rep. Mike Kelly and others filed a lawsuit in state court Tuesday night accusing the Pennsylvania secretary of state of illegally warning that provisional ballots could be offered to absentee voters whose ballots would be rejected.
Officials in states where ballots were still pending urged patience while the results are calculated. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, posted a video Tuesday night warning voters to “stay calm” as the vote count continues.
“Across the state, dedicated county workers stand ready to tirelessly ensure that everyone’s vote counts,” Wolf said.
Michigan
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said there will likely be a “much more complete picture” of Michigan’s results later Wednesday. “We are on our way to having a much more complete picture, if not the vast majority of jurisdictions reporting today,” Benson said during an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon.
In a tweet Wednesday morning, Benson said that “hundreds of thousands of ballots are still being counted in our largest jurisdictions, including Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint, Warren and Sterling Heights.”
In Wayne County, a key jurisdiction that includes Detroit and its metropolitan area, County Clerk Cathy Garrett told CNN on Wednesday that election officials are still counting votes and would not calculate when they might end. Currently, the county reports that more than 609,000 votes have been counted, 64% of those cast there.
“We are not in a competition, it is very important that we be precise,” Garrett said. “We will be here until the job is done.”
Nevada
In Nevada, which Democrat Hillary Clinton won by a small margin in 2016, vote-by-mail counting in populous Clark County was halted overnight and was scheduled to resume at 11 a.m. ET Wednesday, according to the registry of county voters.
Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, is home to 70% of all voters in Nevada and is highly Democratic.
Georgia counting delays
In Georgia, where the rules allowed pre-processing, major counties reported backups and sent workers home rather than finish counting overnight.
By 10:30 p.m. ET Tuesday, Fulton County, which is the largest county in the state and includes Atlanta, had counted all the votes in person and stopped counting the evening mail ballots. Officials plan to resume counting absentee ballots at 8 a.m. Wednesday, Fulton County spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt told CNN.
Fulton County still has an estimated 48,118 absentee ballots to count, and that does not include ballots received in the mail on Tuesday. In neighboring DeKalb County, another Democratic stronghold, elections officials will count 79,000 absentee ballots by mail starting at 11 a.m. ET Wednesday.
Georgia ran into other problems as well. A pipeline burst early Tuesday morning at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena above the all absentee ballot processing room in Fulton County, delaying the count there, county spokeswoman Regina Waller said. No ballot was damaged, according to Waller.
An alleged problem with the voting tabulation software has caused delays in the counting of up to 80,000 mail-in ballots in Gwinnett County, which is east of Atlanta, according to a county spokesperson. Officials believe the software misidentified flaws in the way voters filled out ballots.
Technological problems in various states
Several states had other emerging problems that led to ballot counting delays. In Outagamie County, Wisconsin, which is located on the outskirts of Green Bay, poll workers were working Tuesday to transfer votes from about 13,500 misprinted absentee ballots to clean ballots that will not jam the electronic tabulating machine, said the county clerk to CNN.
In South Carolina, a printing error delayed the counting of 14,600 absentee ballots by mail in Dorchester County, north of Charleston, until later in the week, state election officials said. The marks at the top of ballots that alert the scanner to begin tabulating votes are too small for the scanner to read, said Todd Billman, Dorchester County Elections executive director.
Election officials released a statement Tuesday night saying they plan to scan the ballots again beginning Wednesday morning. If that doesn’t work, Billman told CNN, a poll worker may have to manually duplicate each vote using a touchscreen voting machine, with a witness watching the process.
An internet shutdown occurred Tuesday in Osceola County, central Florida, and the ballots were taken to the county elections office for scrutiny, county commissioner Brandon Arrington said. Arrington said he wasn’t sure how much delay this would cause or how many ballots would be affected. Osceola includes the city of Kissimmee, south of Orlando.
While election officials raised concerns about the challenges of voting during a pandemic, battlefield states reported that voting at polling places was mostly fluid, with only isolated incidents. Michigan Secretary of State Benson said Tuesday that “the precincts are islands of calm,” while a spokesman for the Supervisor of Elections for Broward County in Florida said the day was “boring.”
This story was first published on CNN.com, “Mail-in Ballot Flood Delays Counting in 4 Key States; Some Battlegrounds to Resume Counting Wednesday.”
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