GOP fight against late-arriving mail ballots in Pennsylvania likely wouldn't affect enough votes to close gap

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last updated 8 November 2020

President Trump on Saturday continued to push unfounded allegations of voter fraud via his Twitter account, as his Democratic competitor Joe Biden builds a lead in several states that has him on pace for more than 270 electoral votes and, subsequently, the presidency.

Trump was particularly focused on Pennsylvania, which he was leading until Friday morning when Biden grabbed the edge. The president took issue with the fact that the Keystone State was accepting mail-in ballots that arrived after 8 p.m. on Election Day. Pennsylvania, under a ruling by the state Supreme Court, is allowed to count ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrived by 5 p.m. on Friday. However, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito approved a GOP request that county boards must comply with state guidelines to segregate the late arriving ballots from those that were received on or before Election Day.

Republicans are counting that as a win, but Alito did not direct officials to stop counting votes like they sought, and 42 of the state's 67 counties confirmed they were already following Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar's order to separate the ballots, per The Washington Post. The 25 other counties didn't respond after the state GOP contacted them to see if they were following suit, but it also appears that the total number of ballots the order applies to is relatively small compared to Biden's lead, which is now more than 27,000 votes. The United States Postal Service reportedly processed 4,900 ballots in Pennsylvania on Wednesday and Thursday, which wouldn't make up that difference. Read more at The Washington Post. Tim O'Donnell

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.