Pa. ballots from ‘grace period’ too few to change election results if thrown out
PHILADELPHIA — The vote counting continues.
Even after races are called, even after the world’s eyes turn from Pennsylvania, workers are continuing to count ballots.
Many of the remaining ballots are the slowest or most difficult to count because they have various issues that require elections officials to review them more closely. Others, such as provisional ballots, require checking voters’ eligibility and manually checking whether they had already voted.
While there are tens of thousands of remaining votes — including about 10,000 postmarked by Election Day that arrived during a three-day post-Election Day grace period that Republicans are challenging in court — many of the remaining ballots are not being challenged in any way and will be counted.
And the remaining votes being challenged, even if all of them are thrown out, would not reverse Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.
Biden had 47,600 more of the already-counted votes than President Donald Trump did as of Wednesday.
While state law requires mail ballots to be received by county elections officials by 8 p.m. on Election Day, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline in September because of mail delivery delays and the pandemic.
That extension allowed ballots to be counted if they were received by mail by 5 p.m. last Friday and either postmarked by Election Day or have missing or illegible postmarks.
Republicans have repeatedly sought to block or overturn that ruling, so Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar ordered counties to keep those ballots separated from ballots received by Election Day.
About 10,000 ballots arrived in the grace period after Election Day, the Pennsylvania Department of State said late Tuesday.
At Republicans’ urging, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito — who oversees emergency matters arising from Pennsylvania for the court — ordered the counties last week to keep the ballots separated, which they were already doing because of Boockvar’s guidance. But Alito stopped short of granting Republicans’ request that he order those ballots not be counted at all while high court considers whether to take up the case of whether to overturn the three-day extension.
In the meantime, Boockvar told the court last week, counties were not including their separate tallies of votes that arrived during that period in the overall tally they had reported. Even if the court were to intervene and throw out those ballots at a future date, they alone aren’t enough to change the outcome of the race.
Legal experts are widely skeptical that, even if the Supreme Court were to overturn the grace period for future elections, they would also throw out current ballots submitted by voters following the guidance of election administrators at the time.
In other cases of not-yet-counted ballots, the county board of elections needs to decide whether to accept a ballot with an issue, such as an envelope that the voter signed in the wrong spot. Or, say, a ballot for one county that was placed in a drop box in another county. Some ballots have problems that can still be fixed by voters: Philadelphia released a list of more than 2,000 voters Wednesday whose ballots were received but whose identity cannot be verified. If those voters provide identification by Thursday, their ballots will be accepted and counted.