Crush of mail-in ballots slows tally in four battleground states

In three key states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — election officials were not allowed to begin processing absentee ballots until on or just before Election Day, after Republican-led state legislatures successfully opposed changing laws to allow earlier preparations like other states.

The Trump campaign said Wednesday it would request a recount in Wisconsin, which candidates can do if they are within 1% of the winner’s total. The Republican National Committee has prepared for a large-scale legal battle that could come in a razor-thin contest in one of the key states. “We have thousands of volunteer lawyers and several law firms already on retainer in these battleground states,” said RNC spokesperson Mandi Merritt.

Democrats have also amassed their own legal army to fight any potential court battles.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, said at a press briefing on Wednesday that he is prepared to defend the votes in Pennsylvania as the state continues to process and count mail-in ballots.

“Pennsylvania will have a fair election. And that election will be free of outside influences,” Wolf, a Democrat, said. “I will vigorously and we all will vigorously defend against any attempt to attack that vote in Pennsylvania.”

Pennsylvania counting and lawsuits

In Pennsylvania, where officials couldn’t begin processing millions of early ballots until Tuesday, counties made their own decisions about how to prioritize the crush.

In the major Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, where more than 350,000 mail-in ballots had been received, city officials still had hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots left to count on Wednesday, Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt said on CNN. He noted that Pennsylvania allows mail-in votes to be received and counted up until Friday.

“We are going to continue day and night until we get every one of those votes counted,” Schmidt said.

Democratic-leaning Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, planned to count “24 hours a day until completion,” according to county spokesperson Kelly Cofrancisco.

A handful of Pennsylvania absentee ballots were being challenged in court. A judge heard a GOP challenge to about 93 absentee ballots in Montgomery County over how voters were given opportunities to fix ballots with issues that would have caused them to be thrown out. The Republicans alleged that the county had begun processing mail-in ballots too early and was illegally trying to allow voters to fix defects, such as by adding missing inner envelopes.

Also in Pennsylvania, GOP Rep. Mike Kelly and others filed a lawsuit in state court Tuesday evening accusing the Pennsylvania secretary of state of illegally advising that provisional ballots could be offered to absentee voters whose ballots would be rejected.

Officials in the states where ballots were still outstanding urged patience while the results are calculated.

“The President wants this settled. Joe Biden wants this settled. The people of Pennsylvania want it settled,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said on CNN on Wednesday morning. “And the best way to settle this is to count. And to make sure we have an accurate count and to make sure that all legal, eligible votes are part of that process.”

Michigan

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said that there will likely be a “much more complete picture,” of Michigan’s results later Wednesday. “We’re on track to have a much more complete picture if not the vast majority of jurisdictions reporting out today,” Benson said during an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon.

Benson said there were approximately 100,000 ballots waiting to be counted across the state. Benson said the majority of ballots waiting to be counted are absentee ballots from Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint and Kalamazoo.

Kent County Clerk Lisa Posthumus Lyons told CNN that Grand Rapids had a portion of their total 60,000 absentee ballots to count, but was not sure how many of the 60,000 absentee ballots were left. Kalamazoo County Clerk Tim Snow told CNN that the county is waiting on about 21,000 absentee ballots from the City of Kalamazoo.

And Detroit Deputy City Clerk Andre Gilbert told CNN at noon Wednesday that the city’s absentee counting board had tabulated 158,000 absentee ballots out of the 172,000 absentee ballots it received.

“We’re not in a competition, it’s just very important that we are accurate. We will be here until the job is done,” said Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett. Detroit is the largest city in Wayne County.

Nevada

In Nevada, which Democrat Hillary Clinton won by a slender margin in 2016, the counting of mail-in votes in populous Clark County stopped overnight and was slated to resume at 11 a.m. ET Wednesday, according to the county’s registrar of voters.

Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, is the home of 70% of all voters in Nevada and heavily Democratic.

Nevada will not announce any new statewide results until noon ET Thursday, state election officials tweeted Wednesday morning.

The state still has to count mail ballots received on Election Day, provisional ballots and absentee ballots received over the next week that were postmarked by Election Day. State law allows ballots to count if they are received by November 10 so long as they were postmarked by November 3.

Georgia

In Georgia, where rules allowed for pre-processing, major counties nevertheless reported backups and sent workers home rather than finish counting overnight.

Fulton County — which is the state’s largest county and includes Atlanta — kept a small team counting mail-in ballots overnight and then resumed its count in full on Wednesday morning.

Of the approximately 200,000 votes yet to be counted in Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Wednesday that roughly 74,000 of those are from Fulton County, with 43,000 more early votes still to be tallied there.

There were about 24,000 ballots left to be counted in Dekalb County, in Atlanta’s eastern suburbs, according to Erica Hamilton, the county’s director of voter registration and elections. There were also 7,000 votes to be counted in Forsyth County, northeast of Atlanta, Raffensberger said.

“My team has sent a reminder to counties to get all, let me repeat, all results counted today,” Raffensberger said.

Georgia ran into some issues as it began to tally absentee ballots on Tuesday. A pipe burst early Tuesday morning at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena above the processing room for all absentee ballots in Fulton County, delaying counting there, said county spokeswoman Regina Waller. No ballots were damaged, according to Waller.

A suspected problem with voting tabulation software had caused delays Tuesday in the counting of as many as 80,000 mail-in ballots in Gwinnett County, which is east of Atlanta, according to a county spokesman. Officials believe the software erroneously identified flaws in the way voters filled out the ballots.

Technology issues in multiple states

Several states had other issues pop up that led to delays in counting ballots. In Outagamie County, Wisconsin, which is outside Green Bay, poll workers on Tuesday were working to transfer votes from around 13,500 misprinted absentee ballots to clean ballots that won’t jam the electronic tabulating machine, the county clerk told CNN.

In South Carolina, a printing error delayed the counting of 14,600 absentee-by-mail ballots in Dorchester County, north of Charleston, until later in the week, state elections officials said. The marks at the tops of the ballots that alert the scanner to start tabulating votes are too small for the scanner to read, said Todd Billman, executive director of Dorchester County Elections.

An internet outage occurred Tuesday in Osceola County in central Florida, and ballots were taken to the county’s elections office for counting, said Brandon Arrington, a county commissioner.

While election officials expressed concern about the challenges of voting during a pandemic, the battleground states reported that voting at polling places was mostly smooth, with only isolated incidents. Michigan Secretary of State Benson said Tuesday that “precincts are islands of calm,” while the spokesman for Florida’s Broward County Supervisor of Elections said the day was “boring.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.