Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Vote count finished, challenges remain
Republican, Democratic observers challenge more than 900 provisional ballots
WEST CHESTER » All of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election in Chester County have been counted, with former Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. increasing his lead over President Donald J. Trump, although challenges remain at the county and state level.
County Communications Coordinator Rebecca Brain on Friday said that the county Office of Voters Services had finished counting 4,035 provisional ballots that had been cast on Nov. 3 but that they were able to be challenged by either of the two political parties in the county to determine their validity.
Brain said that of those, 908 had been officially challenged, 519 by Republican election observers and 389 by Democrats. She said she did not know in what category the challenges had come, but that overall they are broken down into 14 categories, including firsttime voters with no identification, a signature or address mismatch and an attestation that was either not complete or signed.
A hearing of the county Board of Elections to consider all the challenges to provisional ballots cast election will be held at 9 a.m.
on Monday. The board is made up of the three county commissioners, two Democrats and one Republican.
County Administrator Bobby Kagel said in response to a question about the election results that he was confident that election officials and staff in the county had conducted “a fair and impartial election,” even though the Trump campaign has challenged the county’s vote-counting process in state and federal court. Those are being handled by the county’s outside legal counsel, Brain said.
As of Friday, the county showed that 82.3 percent of the 380,383 registered voters had cast ballots, the largest turnout in recent history.
Of those, almost equal numbers had come from voters arriving at precincts on Election Day and those sending in their ballots by mail or dropping them off at one of the multiple locations provided for by the county during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 161,9325 in-person votes counted and 151,139 mail-in ballots.
The unofficial results provided by the county show Biden with 181,596 votes to Trump’s 127,998, a difference of 57 percent to 40 percent and more than 53,000 votes. Current results shown statewide have Biden leading Trump by approximately that same margin, 63,192 votes.
Biden picked up an additional 2,531 votes to Trump’s 1,154 votes since provisional results were first tabulated on Tuesday. Then, the Voters Services website showed Biden leading the race in the county with 179,065 votes to Trump’s 126,844.
Still to be reported are the results of the 628 ballots that the county received after Nov. 3 but before the Nov. 6 deadline set by the courts. Those ballots have been challenged by the Trump campaign and are being kept segregated from the full results, Brain said.
Meanwhile, Republicans suffered setbacks to court challenges over the presidential election in three battleground states on Friday while a law firm that came under fire for its work for Trump’s campaign withdrew from a major Pennsylvania case.
The legal blows began when a federal appeals court rejected an effort to block about 9,300 mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day in Pennsylvania — including those 628 ballots segregated by the county. The judges noted the “vast disruption” and “unprecedented challenges” facing the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic as they upheld the three-day extension.
Chief U.S. Circuit Judge D. Brooks Smith said the panel kept in mind “a proposition indisputable in our democratic process: that the lawfully cast vote of every citizen must count.”
Republicans have also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the issue. However, there are not enough late-arriving ballots to change the results in Pennsylvania, given President-elect Joe Biden’s lead. The Democratic former vice president won the state by about 60,000 votes out of about 6.8 million cast.
The Trump campaign or Republican surrogates have filed more than 15 legal challenges in Pennsylvania as they seek to reclaim the state’s 20 electoral votes, but have so far offered no evidence of any widespread voter fraud.
The county election board hearing will be held in the commissioners’ meeting room, at 313 W. Market Street in West Chester. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, attendance by anyone not directly involved in the hearing has been arranged virtually through a livestream on the county’s government Facebook page.
Individuals whose provisional ballots have been challenged may be contacted by Voter Services staff by telephone or email in anticipation of the hearing.