Allegheny County, Pa. is addressing the 35,413 mail-in ballots that are pending (for lack of a better word).
29K "have been ordered by federal court to not be handled or processed until 5 p.m. on Friday," county exec Rich Fitzgerald says.
Another 6,800 w/ other issues (damaged in mail, missing date, etc) will be looked at Friday at 9 a.m. after county swears in a Return Board.
The county will also have to tally ballots that were postmarked on or before Election Day and received by 5 p.m. tomorrow. Total number uncertain, of course.
Also remaining: provisional ballots cast at precincts. There were 5k in primary. Fitzgerald said he estimates there could "easily be double that or more."
Here's how the count has changed in Pennsylvania since shortly before 9 a.m., when Biden took the lead:
PA has uploaded 25,476 results. 23K were mail-in ballots.
Biden won the mail-ins by almost exactly a 2:1 ratio, and his lead has climbed from 5,510 to 13,471.
By my estimate, there are *at least* 95,652 mail-in ballots left to tally. Like we've said all day (and which was just confirmed w/ batch from Westmoreland County), Biden is only expected to grow lead w/ these. Even in Republican strongholds.
Now, as I explain in this story, there's still a large pool of ballots left to review (only to be counted if deemed eligible). By York Daily Record's #, it's clear there are at least 92,500 provisional ballots.
Tracking the amount of ballots scanned in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh region) of the 330,000+ they have to process today:
11 AM: Over 9,000.
1 PM: 25,538
3 PM: 43,894
4:45 PM: 59,799
A little math: Between 1 PM and 4:45 PM, Allegheny County's warehouse workers scanned about 152 ballots per minute.
We'll know more at the next count update -- but rough estimates (at this ballot/minute count) would put the county in a place where they could be ready to upload close to 100,000 votes when the polls close.
You're gonna hear the word "pre-canvass" a lot today in Pennsylvania. Here's what it means, under election law:
Let's thread pre-canvassing here.
Allegheny County says about 25% of the ballots are at "some stage of processing." More than 13,500 "have gone through the declaration review and have had the declaration envelope opened and the secrecy envelopes extracted."
As of 11 a.m.: the county has scanned more than 9,000 ballots so far.
The sanitizer is ready, the voting machines have emerged from hibernation and the mail-in ballots — secrecy envelopes and all — are finally ready for opening in Pennsylvania.
It's Election Day. Here's what you need to know about how to vote in PA today (thread):
For those who want to vote in-person using a machine, polls are open in every one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. If you don’t know your precinct, you can find it by using this tool: pavoterservices.pa.gov/pages/pollingp…
REMEMBER: Anyone in line to vote at 8 p.m. will still be allowed to vote. Don't let anyone tell you differently.
With Heinz Field as a backdrop, this drive-in crowd in Pittsburgh’s North Shore is awaiting a performance by Lady Gaga and one final headlining speech from Joe Biden.
But first, they’re hearing from Kamala Harris, who is live over in Philadelphia. As many beeps here as there are frozen fingers.
“I’m not leaving without your vote tonight, you know that right? “ Lady Gaga says in “Yoü and I.”