Pennsylvania vote count on ‘home stretch’ as Trump lead shrinks

Thousands of ballots are still left to count in Pennsylvania, with a “close race” between Donald Trump and Joe Biden after hundreds of thousands of ballots were processed on Thursday.

Though an “overwhelming majority” of ballots have been counted, “it's not quite clear yet who the winner is,” according to the state’s top elections official.

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“We’re coming in the home stretch,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on Thursday evening. 

Despite anticipated count delays with a potential surge in mail-in ballots, Secretary Boockvar said that outstanding ballots – postmarked on or before 3 November – will be a “fraction” of what the state saw in its primary elections. The state received roughly 60,000 within the three days that followed that election in June.

“I don’t expect it to be a significant amount” of outstanding mail-in ballots, she said.

The battleground state’s 20 Electoral College votes to be awarded to the state’s victor are critical to the president’s re-election attempt, as his path to victory narrows in remaining states where analysts have not declared a winner.

By Thursday evening, the former vice president was predicted to receive 264 of a needed 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Mr Trump was predicted to carry 214, according to projections from the Associated Press.

Election officials from Pennsylvania’s 67 counties have reported 3.2 million votes for Mr Trump and 3.1 million for Mr Biden; more than 1.7 million ballots for Mr Biden were cast by mail, compared to 536,222 for Mr Trump, according to to the state’s elections officials.

Roughly 87.5 per cent of mail-in ballots have been processed.

“The overwhelming majority of ballots will be counted by Friday – we actually have counted the overwhelming majority of ballots, but because it’s a close race, it’s not quite clear yet,” Secretary Boockvar said.

As more votes were processed on Thursday, his lead shrank to less than 80,000, with roughly 326,000 mail-in ballots remaining.

There also remain an unclear number of provisional ballots remaining.

“It’s very close in Pennsylvania – there’s no question,” Secretary Boockvar said. “That means it’s going to take longer to actually see who the winner is. … There are several hundred thousand ballots remaining to be counted.”

Lawyers for the president’s campaign have mounted legal challenges in the state and have threatened to sue to stop the vote count, claiming that election officials were not allowing party observers to monitor the count. The campaign also joined a US Supreme Court challenge to prevent ballots that arrived after Election Day, despite being postmarked by then, from being counted.