Pa. tally may bring challenges

HARRISBURG» Pennsylvania counties ground through ballot counting Tuesday, a week after voting concluded in a high-turnout battleground election that tested a new vote-by-mail law, as President Donald Trump sought to reverse a winning margin for former Vice President Joe Biden.

Preliminary counts due at the close of business Tuesday from counties to the state elections bureau will be watched for how they might affect the presidential race numbers.

Thousands of ballots, however, will not make it into those counts.

Some counties were still slogging through record numbers of timeconsuming provisional ballots Tuesday — many of them cast by voters who ordered a mail-in ballot but never received it, preferred to vote in person on Election Day or were worried that it would not be counted even after they’d mailed it.

Other counties had yet to count military and overseas ballots, which were still arriving Tuesday, and ballots that arrived by mail after the close of business Nov. 3 — Election Day — but before the court-ordered deadline of 5 p.m. last Friday.

York, Bucks and Chester counties were unable to finish sorting out a combined figure of more than 16,000 provisional ballots, county officials said.

A ll told, counties in Pennsylvania have tallied more than 6.77 million ballots, or about 74% turnout.

Biden currently holds an approximately 46,000-vote margin, too wide a gap to qualify for a mandatory statewide recount.

No state or county election official has reported fraud or any other problem with the accuracy of

the count. Still, the Trump campaign has signaled its hopes that litigation may reverse what currently ap

pears likely — that Biden’s supporters will cast the state’s 20 electoral votes in his favor next month.