Pennsylvania vows to count more than 1M mail-in votes as Biden edges closer to Trump
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf vowed to count a flood of more than 1 million outstanding mail-in votes Wednesday as Joe Biden started to cut into President Trump’s big lead in the battleground state.
The Democratic leader called the record turnout a victory for democracy and promised to produce a fair count of the mountain of ballots that remained to be counted.
“Rest assured, your vote will be counted,” Wolf told reporters.
Trump complained without any evidence that Democrats were improperly seeking wipe out his lead.
“They are working hard to make … 500,000 vote advantage in Pennsylvania disappear,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Pennsylvania officials said more than 2.5 million votes were cast by mail ballots. Only about half of those were counted as of early Wednesday.
Biden trailed Trump by a gaping margin of more than 600,000 votes in the Keystone State after votes that were mostly cast in person on Election Day were tallied Tuesday and early Wednesday morning.
Biden was winning mail-in votes by margins of more than 2-1, giving Democrats hope that he can still catch Trump. Only half the mail-in votes were tallied in the deep-blue stronghold of Philadelphia, where Biden was winning the vast majority of the ballots.
The pattern in Pennsylvania mirrored the scenario in other Midwest states where Democrats were quickly making up ground as mail-in votes are counted.
Pennsylvania was seen by both sides as a pivotal state because it was the closest of the so-called #BlueWall states that Trump flipped.
But Biden opened a path to victory even if he loses Pennsylvania by grabbing a big lead in Arizona. That means he leads in states accounting for 270 electoral votes even without Pennsylvania and Georgia, which was also too close to call Wednesday.