Fewer than 37,000 mail ballots are left to count in Philadelphia, the Democratic stronghold where Kamala Harris had hoped to run up the score and offset Donald Trump’s gains in other parts of the state.
Trump is currently leading Harris by about 221,000 votes, or nearly 3 percentage points, in Pennsylvania, with about 90 percent of the vote reported. The math is starting to look daunting for Harris.
Philadelphia election officials said fewer than 203,000 mail ballots had been received on time to be counted, and by their midnight update to the results they had counted 166,000 of them. That leaves only about 37,000 — and not all of those will be eligible to be counted. Likely thousands of those ballots will be rejected for various reasons, such as not having voter signatures on the mail envelopes.
And of course, not all those votes will be for Harris: About 1 in 7 Philadelphia mail ballots have voted for another candidate…..
Nearly all of the city’s mail ballots will be counted in the hours ahead. The Philadelphia Board of Elections normally releases one more small update of mail ballot results in the early morning after Election Day. The final major batch of mail ballots are counted and reported around midday Wednesday.
After that, only a small fraction of Philadelphia’s votes will remain to be counted, including provisional ballots and overseas and military ballots, in the following days.