In a presidential race with an extraordinary number of moving parts, election day finds Pennsylvania under intensifying scrutiny as the place where it could all come together – or fall spectacularly apart.
The state and its 20 electoral college votes are sitting at the center of a perfect storm. Polls show one of the tightest races among the battleground states between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Models project Pennsylvania as the state most likely, when it tips, to take the entire election with it.
The state also overhauled its election laws last year and is allowing no-excuse mail-in voting for the first time. There could be as many as 10 times as many mail-in votes as there were in 2016, Kathy Boockvar, the state’s top election official, said on Sunday.
Pennsylvania law also prohibits election officials from processing mail-in ballots until election day, which means it could take days to know the winner in the state, leaving a window for Trump to claim victory before all the votes are counted. Boockvar has said she’s confident the majority of votes will be counted by Friday.
It’s possible that the entire national election could encounter a physical bottleneck in Philadelphia, the state’s most populous city. Every mail-in ballot in the city – as many as 400,000 – is to be counted inside a cavernous convention center downtown using new equipment and newly trained staff observing social distancing measures.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
