Pennsylvania State Department reported nearly 1.4 million mail-in ballots
The US election remains on hold, with Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s future resting on key battlefield states that were too close to summon and could take at least noon Wednesday to resolve.
In the absence of a “blue wave” for Democrats on Tuesday night, Trump and Biden are bracing for a longer process as the ballots continue to be counted. Early Wednesday morning in the United States, Biden won Arizona, returning the first state to the Democrats from 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.
Here’s the state of play and when we might get some clear results from the states that will determine this year’s winner:
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania was to be watched in a close race, with both campaigns aggressively courting voters in the final days before the election.
At 1:30 a.m. local time, the Pennsylvania State Department reported that nearly 1.4 million mail-in ballots – just over half the total – had been counted statewide, with 67% for Biden and 32% for Trump. There were 3.1 million Election Day votes counted, with 67% for Trump and 32% for Biden.
Pennsylvania has over a million votes to count, its Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, in a Twitter post early Wednesday morning.
In Philadelphia, the most populous county in the Commonwealth, where 76% of registered voters are Democrats, only 75,755 of the expected 350,000 to 400,000 mail-in ballots had been counted by 9 p.m., with Biden winning 94% of them.
Bottom Line: Philadelphia is expected to resume reporting on mail-in ballots around 9 a.m. Wednesday. State officials say a final result should be ready “within days.”
Wisconsin
Vote in Milwaukee, Tuesday.
Wisconsin, with 10 election votes, is expected to release fuller results early in the morning, after election workers battled with an unprecedented number of ballots mailed out from the opening of polls on Tuesday morning. The Biden campaign intended to topple the state after Trump’s narrow victory in 2016.
The state’s electoral system is highly decentralized, with 1,850 municipal clerks administering the elections. Small municipalities could end up first, Meagan Wolfe, the state’s electoral commission administrator, said on a call with reporters Tuesday night. But the biggest impact will come from a tally from Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, where about 169,000 votes were cast.
Bottom Line: Milwaukee is likely to complete its mail-in vote count soon, but some other cities have votes to report as well.
Michigan
Michigan – another state Trump narrowly won in 2016 – likely won’t have final results until Wednesday night, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told reporters. The city of Detroit had a turnout of 55%, which equates to over 250,000 votes.
The state likely won’t have final results until later Wednesday, as Detroit is the largest neighborhood and has seen a record turnout this year.
Benson said other Michigan counties will report in the coming hours, which could give election observers a sense of where the state is. She said 3.3 million mail-in ballots have been received and are being tabulated and 2-2.5 million voted at the polls today.
Bottom Line: “I’m sure we’ll have more than one update for Detroit in the morning,” said Benson, who added that she expects the full compilation of every vote in Detroit to be completed. by Wednesday night.
Georgia
Some of Georgia’s largest counties struggled to count postal votes, blocking the results in the reliable Republican state in which Biden appeared to be performing strong.
Some of Georgia’s larger counties struggled to count postal votes.
In Fulton County, which includes most of the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta, 71% of ridings had reported by 12:30 am. Fulton suffered a setback earlier Tuesday while counting mail-in ballots, after a leak water has forced officials to stop counting as thousands of ballots were not counted.
Votes are also still being counted in neighboring DeKalb County.
Gwinnett County, which has Georgia’s second largest population, election officials also struggled with an issue that blocked the processing of 80,000 postal ballots. By 12:30 p.m., 97% of Gwinnett’s in-person polling stations were reporting.
Bottom Line: Wednesday morning should bring more clarity to Peach State’s results.
North Carolina
North Carolina’s race was close at dawn on Wednesday, with Trump leading by around 77,000 votes by 1:00 a.m.
Election officials clean an early polling station in North Carolina last month. About 62% of voters in the state voted before election day.
About 62% of voters in the state voted before election day. More registered Democrats voted early than Republicans, but a third of the electorate is not affiliated with any of the major parties. The same-day count of the vote, which is expected to bias Republicans, will take longer, and the state has up to nine days to count the ballots mailed in before election day.
Sign of the delays, only a third of the constituencies in Democratic-leaning Wake County were counted while in Granville County, where Hillary Clinton won a narrow victory in 2016, no results were reported. GOP-leaning areas, such as Union County, near Charlotte, also had plenty of votes to count.
Democrats have been comforted by Gov. Roy Cooper’s re-election, but it’s not clear if that’s a signal that Biden can topple the traditionally Republican state.
Bottom Line: State officials said they expected 97% of the vote to be counted by Wednesday morning.
Nevada
The first voters wait to vote in Las Vegas in October.
A final count in Nevada is not expected for several days, as it waits for ballots to be sent out as late as election day, although it is not known how many people have waited so long to vote. With around 80% of the votes counted, Biden held a lead of just under three percentage points.
“Clerks have until Nov. 10 to receive mail-in ballots and until Nov. 12 to count them,” said Jennifer Russell, spokesperson for the Nevada secretary of state.
Bottom line: The state began releasing partial results on Tuesday night, with Biden holding a slim lead over Trump. This tally, which included early voting and polling day, will continue to spread overnight.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
