Rudy Giuliani made this absolutely absurd, untrue claim about PA mailing out 1.8M ballots but counting 2.5M, and now people really believe it and think there’s obvious fraud being ignored.
Hard to know the right way to fight back against this stuff sometimes. Sigh.
The PA Supreme Court dismisses the case brought by U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly that sought to overturn last year’s law creating no-excuse mail voting and to throw out those mail ballots cast in this election.
This is the case the Commonwealth Court had earlier blocked certification in.
Here’s the concurring and dissenting statement from Chief Justice Saylor, which Justice Mundy joins:
Here’s the concurring statement from Justice Wecht (pages 1–4):
“They had an armed guard that stopped us first, they had magnetometers, and they had uniformed police officers who threatened to arrest us if we went in.”
Sounds like a high level of security around the ballot-counting process.
“I presented that order to both the chairman of the board of elections”
The chair, Lisa Deeley, is a woman. Her deputy says Lewandowski “never spoke to Lisa.”
The secretary of state disagreed. She said it wouldn’t be a problem bc counties would count mail ballots after polls close and before the first in-person results come in.
This was before the pandemic surged demand for mail ballots. In March, it was changed from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m.
Philly elections officials paused their counting of mail ballots Thursday, according to a source familiar with the situation, as they scrambled to accommodate a state court order to allow representatives from President Donald Trump's campaign to more closely observe the process.
Kevin Feeley, spox for Philly elections officials, just gave super brief statement:
“The count is going forward. There was a brief pause earlier today in light of the ongoing litigation. But it has resumed in accordance with the law.”
Updates on this and everything else will be on our live blog as they come in:
There are a lot of mail ballots still to be counted, and they’re coming primarily from Democrats. That’s one of the reasons we expect a sizable “blue shift” in the votes.
Trump: “We’re up 690,000 votes in Pennsylvania … it’s going to be almost impossible to catch.”
The results of most of PA’s mail ballots aren’t known yet, with at least 1.44 million left to be counted or included in the totals as of 3 a.m., according to PA Dept of State data.
And those votes will almost certainly be heavily for Biden.
First of all, mail ballots in general were used much more by Democrats than Republicans. Even in most counties Trump won in 2016, Democrats outnumbered Republicans when it came to voting by mail.