County by county, Pa. officials report vote results
HARRISBURG » County election boards across Pennsylvania faced a deadline Monday to certify election results to the Department of State, an important milestone in the tabulation of votes for the presidential contest and other races.
A Department of State spokesperson declined to say which counties have reported, and it was unclear whether an update would be issued at day’s end.
“The Department of State continues to work closely with and support all 67 counties as they work to complete the election certification process,” spokesperson Wanda Murren said in Monday morning email to reporters.
The boards in two populous counties split along party lines in votes taken Monday, with majority Democrats in both places voting to certify the results.
Allegheny County, which gave a majority to Democrat Joe Biden, voted 2-1, and Luzerne County, which Republican Donald Trump won, approved its results, 3-2. Messages seeking comment were left for Republicans who voted no in both counties.
Allegheny’s tally does not include the fraction of votes that are part of pending legal challenges.
Several other counties voted unanimously to certif y on Monday, as Erie County did late last week, and there were no reports of counties voting against certification.
Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court on Monday said that more than 8,300 mail-in ballots in Philadel
phia that had been challenged by the Trump campaign because of minor technical errors should be counted.
A voter’s failure to include a handwritten name, address or date by their declaration on the outer envelope, the court said, does not “warrant the wholesale disenfranchisement of thousands of Pennsylvania voters.”
A Republican state Senate challenger in Allegheny County, Nicole Ziccarelli, filed an emergency request for an injunction Monday morning with the state Supreme Court, asking it to prevent the county from certifying. The justices have not indicated what they will do.
Ziccarelli is down in AP’s count by a single vote, out of about 133,000 cast, against Democratic Sen. Jim Brewster.
After the counties send certified results to Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, she must then tabulate, compute and canvass votes for all races. The law requires her to perform that task quickly but does not set a specific deadline.
Boockvar then will inform Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf of the results, and he will list the state’s electors for the Dec. 14 Electoral College meeting on a “certificate of ascertainment” sent to the national archivist. Four years ago, Wolf made that notification Dec. 12.
Biden won the presidency with the help of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes. His margin in the state currently stands at more than 81,000 out of nearly 7 million cast.
Trump’s federal lawsuit challenging the results was dismissed Saturday by a judge who declined to halt Boockvar’s certification. The Trump campaign has appealed to the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The large number of votes cast by mail, and the large number of provisional ballots that were cast, have been a challenge for vote counters across the state.
In Berks County, which includes Reading, officials said last week they did not expect to report to Boockvar until Wednesday, because that is when a fiveworking day review period will close.