Some state election officials called it a nightmare and planned to resume counting in the morning, while some Pennsylvania counties did not begin tabulating their mail-in votes until Wednesday morning. The record-breaking mail-in ballot this year as a result of the Covid-19 epidemic will favor Biden, whose campaign encourages Democrats to vote early, while Trump could benefit from an individual vote on election day.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly called for the results to be prolonged so that the winner can be declared on election night, although officials technically have days or weeks to complete official counts before the state average is certified. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – three important states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – after Republican-led state legislatures successfully opposed changes to legislation to allow earlier preparations, like other states, before election officials or before election day.
Biden commented as early as Wednesday calling for patience while the workers count continued, with Trump attacking the legitimate counting of votes and falsely claiming he had won in states where millions of ballots are pending. Trump claimed by tweeting that the election was being stolen from him, labeled via Twitter, “could be controversial and misleading.”
In Pennsylvania, where officials could not begin processing thousands of early ballots by Tuesday, counties made their own decisions about how to prioritize crush.
City Commissioner Al Schmidt said Philadelphia officials counted 75,000 mail-in ballots out of the 350,000 returned by late Tuesday night, City Commissioner Al Schmidt said. A major Democratic g-hold, the city will not have an update number on the mail-in ballot until 9 a.m., Philadelphia City Commissioners head Lisa Dilli told a news conference early Wednesday morning.
Election workers in Luzern County, a northeastern county near Scranton, stopped the mail-in ballot count Tuesday evening and will resume Wednesday morning, according to county manager David Pedri. He said the county counted 26,000 mail-in ballots of about 60,000 cast.
Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, plans to count “24 hours a day until completion,” according to county spokeswoman Kelly Cofrancisco.
In Georgia, where the rules allowed pre-processing, however, major counties reported backups and sent workers home instead of completing the count overnight.
By 10:30 a.m. Tuesday night, Fulton – the state’s largest county and included Atlanta – had counted all individual votes and closed the mail-in ballot count until the evening. Officials said Wednesday morning that Fulton County spokeswoman Jessica Corbett told CNN late Tuesday night. The counting of absentee ballots is planned to resume at.
Fulton County, Atlanta’s most populous city, still has an estimated 48,118 absentee ballots left, not counting the ballots received by mail on Tuesday. Electoral officials in Kaka County, a neighboring country in the second Democratic neighborhood, will count 79,000 absentee ballots by mail at 11 a.m. Wednesday.
Georgia ran into other problems as well. A pipe ruptured early Tuesday morning in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena above the processing room for all absentee ballots in Flint County, there was a delay in the count, said Regina Valer, a county spokeswoman. No ballots were damaged, according to Ball Lern.
A count of 80,000 mail-in ballots has been delayed in Gwyneth County, east of Atlanta, due to a suspected problem with voting tabulation software software, a county spokesman said. Officials believe the software identified errors in the way voters cast their ballots.
Legal fight loom
The Republican National Committee is preparing for a large-scale legal battle that could lead to razor-thin contests in key states. “These states of war have thousands of volunteer lawyers and many legal entities already on the retailer,” said Mandi Merritt, an RNC spokeswoman.
Democrats have also mobilized their own legal armies to fight any potential court battles.
And there are already post-election legal battles starting. Republicans have filed lawsuits challenging at least 1,200 absentee ballots in Democratic-leaning Montgomery County outside of Philadelphia. A federal judge will hear the challenge Wednesday morning.
How the three Republicans viewed absentee voting with potential technical issues and oversaw the process of mail-in votes described in federal court and they believe election officials could give voters a chance because of issues to improve voting that would cause them to be thrown out. Republicans allege that the county began the mail-in ballot process as early as possible and was illegally trying to allow voters to correct defects, such as missing an internal envelope.
Even in Pennsylvania, GOP Rep. Mike Kelly and others filed a lawsuit in state court Tuesday evening, alleging that Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had illegally advised that absentee voters could be offered temporary ballots whose ballots would be rejected.
Officials in the states where the results are calculated urged the rest to be patient. Democrat Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolfe released a video Tuesday evening warning voters to “keep quiet” as the vote count continues.
“Across the state, dedicated county activists are ready to count on everyone’s vote endlessly,” Wolfe said.
In Milwaukee, absentee ballots were being counted at a central facility, and the county’s election director, Juliata Henry, predicted they would be counted by 5 a.m. Wednesday, a spokeswoman said. “There’s still no shape, shape or unusual design for the countdown jurisdictions in the morning,” said Wisconsin State Chief Electoral Officer Megan Wolfe.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who suggested in Election Week that the count could be completed by Friday, told reporters Tuesday evening that the state could “see the full results of every tabulation outside of Michigan in the next 24 hours,” Bateson told Detroit. Gati, where 100,000 absentee ballots were counted as of late on Tuesday, insisted that the state was in the process of counting the results sooner than expected.
Detroit Deputy Clerk Andre Gilbert told CNN that the largest city in Wayne County, the unofficial results will be “probably early in the morning,” with the suffrage vote soon to be completed and the absent ballot to take longer. About 92,000 absentee ballots remain to be counted, according to City Clark’s latest official report.
Technical problems in multiple states
Other issues popped up in some states causing delays in the vote count. In Outgamine County, Wisconsin, just outside Green Bay, voters were working Tuesday to cast ballots from nearly 13,500 misprinted absentee ballots that would not go to an electronic tabulating machine, County Clark told CNN.
In South Carolina, in Dorchester County, north of Charleston, due to a typographical error, the counting of 14,600 absent by-mail ballots was delayed until the end of the week. Todd Bilman, executive director of Dorchester County Elections, said the top marks on the ballot that alert scanners to start tabulating votes are too small for the scanner to read, said Todd Bilman, executive director of Dodchester County Elections.
Election officials sent a statement Tuesday evening saying they plan to run the polls through a scanner again Wednesday morning. If Billman told CNN that every vote could be manually copied by a polling worker using a touch-screen voting machine, the witness would observe the process.
The Internet exploded Tuesday in Ossola County, Central Florida, and ballots were taken to the county’s election office for counting, County Commissioner Brandon Arrington said. Arrington said he was not sure how long the delay would be or how many ballots would be affected. Ossella includes the town of Kisimi just south of the land Relando.
While election officials expressed concern about the challenges of voting during the epidemic, the battlefield said voting at polling stations was generally easy, with only isolation incidents. Michigan Secretary of State Bains said Tuesday that “the ancestors are quiet islands,” while a spokesman for Florida’s Broadard County Supervisor of Elections said the day was “boring.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Caitlin Polantz, Nick Valencia, Jason Morris, Caroline Kenny, Bill Veer, Ann’s Greer, Kelly Mena, Sara Murray, Casey Tolan, Meredith Edwards, Kurt Divine, Scott Brunst, N, Rob Kuznia, Kevin Lip and Kevin Lip Gave.