Seven Pennsylvania counties won’t start counting mail-in ballots until Wednesday

[PREDICT TUESDAY’S WINNER WITH THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S INTERACTIVE ELECTORAL MAP]

“The canvassing, or counting, of mail-in and absentee ballots in Cumberland County will begin on Wed. Nov. 4 at 9 a.m., the day after the General Election,” Cumberland County officials tweeted. “This action fully complies with state law. Due to available resources and the COVID-19 pandemic, this will allow the county to give equal weight to in-person and mail-in and absentee ballots.”

Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Kathy Boockvar, the top election official in the state, told the Wall Street Journal that the final results for the state might not be known until as late as Friday. She added that the “overwhelming majority” of counties will start counting ballots on Election Day. Pennsylvania is one of 34 states that does not allow mail-in ballots to be counted until Election Day, according to Ballotpedia.

President Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by less than 1 percentage point — a margin of fewer than 45,000 ballots. Given that nearly 3 times as many Democrats in Pennsylvania have voted early or by mail compared to Republicans, according to TargetSmart, holding off on counting those ballots in reliably red counties could give the misrepresentation of a larger margin in favor of Trump on election night.

So far, more than 2.4 million voters in Pennsylvania have already cast their ballots using early voting or voting by mail, roughly 39% of the total number of ballots cast in 2016, according to the U.S. Election Project.

On Sunday night, Trump said that he was prepared to start a legal battle to cut off collecting ballots after Election Day. Trump said it “wasn’t fair” that the results of the election might not immediately be known.

“I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election,” Trump told reporters. “I think it’s a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that’s very bad. You know what that thing is. I think it’s a very dangerous, terrible thing. And I think it’s terrible when we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers. I think it’s a terrible thing.”

Trump singled out Pennsylvania in his remarks after the Supreme Court ruled that Pennsylvania could accept ballots that arrive up to three days after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by Nov. 3.

“We’re going to go in the night of — as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers,” he said. “But we don’t want to have Pennsylvania, where you have a political governor, a very partisan guy, and we don’t want to have other states like Nevada, where you have the head of the Democratic clubhouse as your governor. We don’t want to be in a position where he’s allowed to, every day, watch ballots come in — ‘Gee, if we could only find 10,000 more ballots.'”

Josh Shapiro, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, criticized Trump’s comments, saying that the election isn’t over until all votes are in.

“FACT CHECK,” Shapiro tweeted. “Our elections are over when all the votes are counted. But if your lawyers want to try us, we’d be happy to defeat you in court one more time.”