Trump closes gap on Biden in Arizona as mail-in ballots are counted

Pennsylvania still has hundreds of thousands of votes left to count despite the secretary of state saying results could be returned on Thursday as Joe Biden closes the gap and President Donald Trump loses a legal bid to stop ballot counting in Philadelphia.  

Pennsylvania is among a handful of battleground states Trump and Biden are narrowly contesting as they seek the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

Trump, who held a 675,000-vote lead early Wednesday, prematurely declared victory in the state, which holds 20 electoral college votes.

‘We’re winning Pennsylvania by a tremendous amount. We’re up 690,000 votes in Pennsylvania. These aren’t even close. It’s not like, “Oh, it’s close,” Trump said during an appearance at the White House.

But by Thursday evening Trump’s lead had slipped to about 26,319 votes, as mail in ballots from across the state continued to be counted. The late counted ballots were overwhelming in Biden’s favor. 

Pennsylvania still has hundreds of thousands of votes left to count despite the secretary of state saying results could be returned on Thursday as Joe Biden closes the gap and President Donald Trump loses a legal bid to stop ballot counting in Philadelphia 

There’s a possibility the race won’t be decided for days and according to MSNBC, there are about 250,000 ballots left to count. If there is less than a half percentage point difference between Biden and Trump’s vote total, state law dictates that a recount must be held.

Democrats had long considered Pennsylvania a part of their ‘blue wall’ — a trifecta that also includes Wisconsin and Michigan — that for years had served as a bulwark in presidential elections. In 2016, Trump won each by less than a percentage point.

Biden, who was born in Scranton, claims favorite-son status in the state and has long played up the idea that he was Pennsylvania’s ‘third senator’ during his decades representing neighboring Delaware. He’s also campaigned extensively in the state from his home in Delaware.

If Biden wins Pennsylvania, he wins the election. Currently, he has 264 votes – including Arizona despite that coming slightly back into play. Even without Arizona, if he won Pennsylvania, he would take the White House.  

Trump cannot win on Pennsylvania alone; with 214 electoral college votes, he’d still need to pick up either Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona or Nevada – the four other states where a result is yet to be officially confirmed. 

Earlier on Thursday, Kathy Boockvar told CNN’s Jake Tapper that results Pennsylvania could be in by Thursday. 

‘I think there’s about 550,000 some odd — you know, plus or minus — ballots that are still in the process of being counted today. Some of those may have already been counted but are not yet uploaded. But yeah, they’re coming in. We’re getting 10,000 here, 20,000 here, counties are furiously at work.’

Results are now expected to be in for Pennsylvania by Friday. 

Earlier on Thursday, Kathy Boockvar (left) told CNN’s Jake Tapper that results Pennsylvania could be in by Thursday. ‘I think there’s about 550,000 some odd — you know, plus or minus — ballots that are still in the process of being counted today. Some of those may have already been counted but are not yet uploaded.’ Results are now expected on Friday

Meanwhile, Trump had sued Pennsylvania to undermine whatever election result is returned.

Voting was temporarily halted in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh on Thursday as a result of the legal row. A judge intervened and dismissed the federal motion.

In Nevada, there are only around 51,000 votes left to call before Friday and they say they need that much time. Arizona also says they need until Friday to deliver a result on their remaining 450,000 votes.  

The Trump campaign had a brief legal victory in Pennsylvania on Thursday when a judge ruled ballot observers can watch officials count ballots within six feet. Representatives of both campaigns were in the room to watch the counts but at a further distance because of the coronavirus. A county judge agreed with the Trump campaign, but the state Supreme Court rejected it.

The situation in Pittsburgh is complicated by about 30,000 outstanding ballots, where a vendor sent the wrong ballots to voters and had to reissue new ballots with the correct races.

Poll workers now have to examine these ballots to make sure that people don’t vote twice, or, if they sent in the wrong ballot, they didn’t vote in races they aren’t eligible for.

They cannot legally be counted until Friday when Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh sits, swears in a special board to examine these ballots, as required by law

Trump’s team of lawyers have filed lawsuits on multiple fronts – to try to stem the flow of presumably pro-Biden mail ballots into the system, and to try to force greater access for observers so they presumably can challenge more individual ballots.

They scored an initial win Thursday morning, which former Florida Secretary of State Pam Bondi, a Trump backer, brandished at a press conference.

The ruling, by the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, reverses a decision by the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia. It lets Trumps observers ‘be permitted to observe all aspects of the canvassing process, within 6 feet, while adhering to all COVID-19 protocols, including wearing masks and maintaining social distancing.’

Trump touted the ‘Big legal win in Pennsylvania!’ on Twitter. But then the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania almost instantly struck it down when Democrats appealed. 

The reason of the appeal was not concern over the watching itself, experts said, but because Democrats say Republicans accepted the rules on watching before they went into effect.

Conceding that the rules could be changed after they had been agreed would open the way to more rules being changed, they argue.

That is not the end of the road for the Trump campaign. 

The big battle, with a greater potential to affect the count, could come in an effort to challenge an earlier Supreme Court decision allowing the state to count mail-in ballots that come in three days after Election Day.

Conservative justices had indicated that it could get another hearing should these ballots that get counted later prove decisive.

Nevada has inexplicably delayed giving its election result, saying they need until at least tomorrow to count the remaining votes, as the country and the world wait in agony to find out who would be the next President.

It’s unclear exactly how many votes there are left to count across the entire state but in Clark County, where Las Vegas is an which accounts for 800,000 of the 1.1million votes that have already been counted, officials say there are 51,000 that they won’t be able to return a result on until tomorrow. 

They claim it’s because that is simply how long the process takes, despite somehow being able to count 15 times as many votes since polls closed on Tuesday.     

Biden is leading in Nevada but only by 11,545 votes which is around 1 percent. If he claims the state today, he will win another 6 electoral college points, giving him 270 when factoring in the 11 that come from Arizona.

Arizona was called for him on Wednesday morning by Fox and the AP but with 450,000 votes still outstanding, it remains in play for Trump. If Biden loses Arizona, he has 259 electoral college votes. He’d need another 11 from either Georgia – which holds 16 – North Carolina – which holds 15 – or Pennsylvania – which holds 20 – to win.

Ric Grenell, Donald Trump adviser and former acting director of national intelligence, speaks during a news conference in front of the Clark County Election Department, Thursday. They say they have ‘evidence’ that tens of thousands of votes were cast fraudulently in Nevada 

It’s unclear when North Carolina will announce, but it is expected to go to Trump as it did in 2016. The race in Nevada has been tight. For most of the morning, Biden led by only around 7,000 votes there.  

Trump’s team is crying fraud. They say they have ‘evidence’ that ‘tens of thousands of votes’ had been cast there fraudulently. 

‘We are confident that when all legal votes are tallied — and only legal votes are tallied — President Trump will win the state of Nevada,’ Former Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell told Fox News on Thursday morning. 

‘The reality is transparency is not political. Ballots are not automatically legal votes until they’re checked. We are not being able to check.

‘There’s a 30 day residency requirement in the state of Nevada. If you haven’t been in the state for 30 days it is illegal to vote.

‘We are filing this federal lawsuit to protect legal voters. 

‘It is unacceptable in this country to have illegal votes counted. That is what’s happening in the state of Nevada,’ Grenell claimed at a press conference. 

Nevada law states that to be eligible to vote, a person has to have been a resident of the state for at least 30 days before the election. 

That does not necessarily mean that they have to have been physically in the state for the 30 days preceding the election.  

Trump’s people also claim that many of the votes in Nevada came from people who no longer live there, or were cast under the names of deceased people. 

Joe Biden and Donald Trump are just about neck and neck in Georgia after the president’s lead dipped below 2,000 votes in the latest ballot count on Thursday night.  

Trump remains ahead but only by a slim margin of 1,775, putting both candidates in equal standing in terms of percentage points with each holding 49.4 per cent of the vote. 

There are now approximately 14,000 ballots that still need to be processed in the state in addition to the 8,900 overseas and military ballots that are due to arrive by 5pm on Friday. 

Of the outstanding votes, about 5,000 will come from Clayton County, a largely democratic county, which are expected to be counted by midnight, the county’s board of elections directors, Shauna Dozier told CNN.   

Trump’s standing in Georgia has swiftly weakened in the last 24 hours, having been up 9,000 votes on Thursday morning and 18,000 on Wednesday night.  

Biden could win the election with Georgia, which amounts to 16 electoral college points, if he holds on to his lead in Arizona. 

The result in Arizona is not expected until Friday because there are still 285,000 votes left to count. About 200,000 of those will come from Maricopa County, where officials are expected to update the count by 11am.

Officials in both Arizona and Nevad – where only 51,000 need to be counted – say they need at least another day to get through them and get through them accurately, despite the fact that they’ve rattled through many, many more votes in the last few days alone. 

Why it is taking so long to reach a conclusion is a question that millions of frustrated Americans are asking and it’s being heard around the world. There is no simple answer for it. 

In one Georgia county, there was a corrupt memory card on one scanner which meant 400 had to be recounted. Officials in some counties are also using paper ballots for the first time in 20 years because they voted earlier this year that machine voting was not secretive enough. They are then scanning all of the paper votes which is an ‘arduous’ process, it was said on Thursday. 

In some states, it’s because the race is simply tighter than it was in the last election so is difficult for news and TV networks – who ordinarily call elections – to make a decisive projection. Another reason is that there are more mail-in ballots this year than in elections gone by because of COVID-19. They are taking longer to pour in and different states had different rules on when those could start being counted. 

In any event, Trump is already contesting the results in several states. He says there has been voter fraud in Nevada, with people sending in ballots under dead residents’ names, and from non-residents. 

In Georgia, he says they weren’t able to verify that the count was being done properly.  

In Wisconsin, he is also demanding a recount, and in Michigan and Pennsylvania, he wants the counting to be halted.  

Trump appeared in public for the first time in more than 36 hours on Thursday, speaking in the White House briefing room, where he made unfounded accusations that the presidential election was being stolen from him.

In almost every state that Biden has won, Trump’s lead has been strong at first then shrank as more ballots- specifically mail-in ballots – have been tallied up. 

He thinks it is suspicious. 

Speaking on Thursday, Georgia’s Voting System Implementation Manager, Gabriel Sterling, said there was nothing suspicious or strange about the process, but that elections were never normally so close so it doesn’t always have to come down to an official count. 

‘We can’t know how long the process will take. We hope to have clarity but “done” is a very relative term at this point.

‘As we’ve been stating for weeks and months, it’s going to take time.  The effort here is to make sure everybody’s legal vote is counted properly.

‘The issue we have in Georgia is it’s a close vote. There’s other states that have more votes to count than we do but it’s a wide margin so nobody cares,’ Sterling said. 

He said he did anticipate giving a result by the end of the day. 

In Georgia, Superior Court judge James Bass said there was ‘no evidence’ to the Trump suit’s claims that a 53 ballots arrived late and got mixed with other ballots. In Michigan, Judge Cynthia Stephens ruled against the Trump campaign’s push to stop the count in order to gain additional access for its observers. ‘I have no basis to find that there is a substantial likelihood of success on the merits,’ she said.

‘All of the recent Biden claimed States will be legally challenged by us for Voter Fraud and State Election Fraud,’ Trump tweeted Thursday amid the nationwide blitz of court challenges. ‘Plenty of proof – just check out the Media. WE WILL WIN! America First!’

Trump’s team scored a win in a Pennsylvania court, but not on an issue that appears likely to sway a race with thousands of ballots being processed.

‘The Trump campaign called it a ‘major victory,’ but state officials appealed, saying it ‘jeopardizes both the safety of the City Defendants’ canvass, plus the privacy of voters.’

Even if the Trump legal efforts don’t ultimately prevail, they are already succeeding in slowing down the voting process, and Trump’s allies are using them to claim Trump has seized an ‘overwhelming victory’ among ‘verifiable’ ballots.