Now, a week after the primary, votes are still being counted, leading local election officials to sound the alarm, warning America may not know the outcome in the battleground state on election night in November.
“We don’t want the world on our front step, waiting for us to tell them who won. It’s as simple as that,” said Lee Soltysiak, the chief operating officer and chief clerk for Montgomery County, a suburb of Philadelphia.
Soltysiak told ABC News Monday that he expected to be done tabulating all the ballots received by the time polls closed at 7 p.m. on June 2 but that didn’t include any of the approximately 5,800 additional ballots received after that point that still need to be counted….
While it isn’t uncommon for states which have higher percentages of mail ballots to take longer to count and report their election results, historically, these states aren’t the states that could decide the presidential election.
It’s unclear how big of an issue coronavirus will be in the fall, but in a state like Pennsylvania, where President Donald Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton was just 44,292 votes, seeing the same massive influx in vote-by-mail ballots could leave the election uncalled for days, as election officials process those ballots.
Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said the primary went “remarkably smoothly,” and called the mail-in ballots a “huge success,” but even so, she also said she was “absolutely” concerned about the general election.
“This surge is one thing, but I think we could expect a lot more than this in November,” she said during a press conference on election night. “Even without COVID-19 people now, you know, have a head start on knowing this exists and to have this amount of volume, and participation and engagement is likely we’ll likely see that again.”