Pennsylvania official says ‘overwhelming majority’ of vote to be counted Thursday

The top elections official in Pennsylvania said the “overwhelming majority” of ballots will have been counted by the end of Thursday, potentially giving a clearer picture of which presidential candidate will triumph in the most important swing state left on the board.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said there are roughly 550,000 ballots outstanding. Of those, about 165,000 are in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia regions, Boockvar said.

“It’s looking like we’ll have the overwhelming majority counted by today,” she said.

Trump’s lead had fallen to just under 100,000 votes in Pennsylvania at 4 pm as Biden has piled up the votes as absentee ballots are counted in major metro areas.

There is no path to the White House for Trump at this point without Pennsylvania. Biden could still win the White House without the Keystone State, but his campaign says they believe they’ll end up victorious by a “sizable” margin when all the votes are tallied.

Without Pennsylvania, Biden could still get to 270 electoral votes if he wins Arizona and Nevada, where he is in the lead. 

Biden is also cutting into Trump’s lead in Georgia, which has 16 electoral votes. A surprise in that state could also get Biden to 270. 

Trump is hoping to hold off Biden in Georgia and Pennsylvania, and that he can overcome deficits in either Nevada or Arizona.

If the race in Pennsylvania goes down to the wire it’s possible that the state’s results will not be known until Friday night.

Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, has paused counting its remaining 36,000 ballots until Friday.

A court ordered that 29,000 ballots be set aside for additional scrutiny because a vendor originally sent those voters the wrong ballots. An additional 6,800 ballots need to be examined by hand because they were bent and do not fit in the machines or because of technical questions.

Allegheny County has also not counted its provisional ballots, and there could be 10,000 or more of those.

The Trump campaign is challenging the state’s Supreme Court ruling that ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can be received by Friday and still be counted.

Pennsylvania has been counting those ballots but has been segregating them because of the court challenge.

Boockvar said there have only been a small number of ballots that were postmarked Nov. 3 and received after Election Day. She said Pennsylvania is not expecting a crush of the late ballots to be received before the Friday deadline.

The Trump campaign has won one legal fight so far, which allowed its election monitors to stand a little bit closer to the action in Philadelphia. Officials at the vote counting center in Philadelphia briefly paused counting to arrange for the monitors to stand closer.