At 1:38 in the morning on Wednesday, November 9, 2016 in New York, in the New York Convention Center under the glass ceiling where Hillary Clinton planned to celebrate her victory, the most important alert from the Associated Press (AP) agency came to mobile phones: “Donald Trump wins Pennsylvania.” With that message it was clear that the Republican would be the next president. Only a few hours had passed since the polls closed that Tuesday.
In November 2020, the AP alert from the once again key state of Pennsylvania came four days after the election. At 11:25 a.m. on the East Coast on Saturday, November 7, the agency announced that Joe Biden had won Pennsylvania in Tuesday’s elections and one minute after he had won the presidency of the United States. What had happened in four years for the Pennsylvania result to take so long to be clear?
What happened
The vote in Pennsylvania was close in both presidential elections, even more so in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 44,000 votes, or seven-tenths. In 2020, Biden’s margin of victory was about 81,000 votes or 1.2% of the vote.
What had happened between those two presidential elections was the approval in 2019 in Pennsylvania of Law 77 to reform the state’s voting system, which, like the rest, has full powers to decide the rules on voting and counting. The law was a bipartisan agreement between Pennsylvania’s then-Republican-controlled legislature and the Democratic governor. It included a key piece: the possibility of voting by mail for all citizens without having to present justification. Thus, voting by mail went from 4% in November 2016 to 39% in November 2020, in the middle of the pandemic and when there was still no vaccine to protect against COVID.
In the United States, 18 states allow voting by mail without having to present an excuse, but the particularity of Pennsylvania is that it does not allow the processing of votes received until seven in the morning on election day, when the polls open. Election workers put a “received” stamp on the vote by mail, but, unlike most states in the country, in Pennsylvania they do nothing else to prepare the ballot, which is placed in two envelopes and requires several checks beforehand. to put it in the optical reader that counts the votes on election day.
“This is the main reason for the significant delays in the vote count in the state,” Dan Mallinson, professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University and specialist in local politics, explains to elDiario.es. “I don’t think we’ll know the winner in Pennsylvania on election night because the law doesn’t allow poll workers to do anything until seven in the morning that day.” Mallinson estimates from the numbers so far that more than a million people will vote by mail in Pennsylvania and that counting may be especially slow in highly populated counties like Philadelphia.
In 2020, more than 2.7 million of the nearly seven million people who participated voted by mail in Pennsylvania. Then the participation rate was high, 70%, but this time it could be higher.
What election workers have to do before opening those votes to count them is verify the signature and the written date of the day on the outer envelope that the voter is required to put, remove the ballot from that outer envelope and from another inner envelope called “secret”, smoothing out the ballot and putting it in the scanner that counts the votes. “The ballots often come folded several times and you have to remove the wrinkles so they can fit through the scanner,” Steve Ulrich, director of the PoliticsPAa local media outlet specializing in Pennsylvania politics, and who previously worked as a county elections director. “If anyone thinks they are going to stay up all night thinking that the Pennsylvania canvass is going to be completed and they are going to be ready to add it to the puzzle, they are very wrong.”
Ballots like an accordion
Ulrich remembers election night 2020 in the elections office he ran in York County, one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties and home to about 400,000 people. In the case of voting by mail, about 50 people were responsible for opening the outer envelope, setting it aside and removing the ballot from the secure secret envelope. “If it’s not in the secret envelope, you put it aside and mark it as a problem… And then you find ballots folded in all kinds of folds. There are ballots like an accordion… We saw cases of voters who folded them 12 times.”
He says that in York they finished their vote tabulations around two in the morning and they still had 8,000 “provisional” votes left, that is, those that have been cast to later be reviewed more calmly because the voter’s name does not appear in a polling station. electoral, there is some discrepancy or difficulty in identifying you as a registered voter in a country where there is no national identity document. Not everyone can do it because it is a delicate review that can end up in court. Reviewers are typically only members of the county’s permanent election commission, not poll workers hired for Election Day.
Votes for the review are usually left for last. “A team of four people, including me, had to analyze 8,000 provisional ballots,” says Ulrich. “If you review one per minute, with a team of four people and without any type of rest, there would be about 1,900 provisional ballots in an eight-hour day… For the total, it takes four days.”
Some counties notify voters by mail of problems so they have the opportunity to fix them with a provisional vote on Election Day and the ball of ballots grows.
In 2020, Pennsylvania counties rejected about 34,000 ballots for formatting defects and other issues. A common mistake, Ulrich recalls, is that the voter puts their date of birth on the outer envelope instead of the date they sent the ballot. A new rule now includes the entire year on the envelope so that the voter understands it better, but the Supreme Court in September overturned a lower court ruling that ruled that it was unconstitutional to annul the vote for this minor defect of form when the ballot inside It can only be from this year and there is a stamp indicating receipt at the electoral office.
High participation
Each obstacle to voting or counting represents a delay that can end up like in 2020. Ulrich believes that although there is a lower percentage of voting by mail in more normal elections, without a pandemic, the number can still be high due to total participation. He predicts that it can reach 75% because of “the attention surrounding these elections.”
“We all hear the challenges we are going to encounter. But if the state or the counties don’t bring in more people, it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen,” he explains.
The attempt to pass a bipartisan law before the election that would allow the process to at least verify mail-in ballot signatures and remove it from the outer envelope seven days before Election Day has failed. Republicans wanted to include other measures such as banning special drop boxes so voters can deposit their ballot more securely instead of sending it by mail.
The Pennsylvania House of Representatives, with a Democratic majority, approved the change to be able to process votes seven days before November 5, but the Senate, with a Republican majority, did not even want to put the rule to a vote. Trump pressured his local allies to stop the law, a source told the magazine Rolling Stone.
Republican mirage
It is not just about the discomfort or tension of waiting for the result of the key state due to the tightness of the race and the number of electoral votes (19 of the 270 of the electoral college necessary to be elected president are distributed).
The delay in counting creates the so-called “Republican mirage”, since Republicans, who tend to vote more in person, are usually the first to start joining in rural and small areas while, as voting by mail is added and the vote of the cities, the scrutiny turns towards Democratic voters. The slower the process, the greater the chances that Trump will mobilize his voters to “stop” the counting, as happened in 2020.
The gap between Democrats and Republicans in the use of voting by mail has also widened since Trump and other Republicans began spreading hoaxes that it was not safe to vote by mail or fraud could be committed (more than 60 court cases concluded in against the Trump allegations, some because the campaign itself withdrew the complaints).
“All these dynamics are the same. The Pennsylvania legislature has not solved any of the problems of not having pre-processed ballots and the former president’s rhetoric remains the same,” says Mallinson, the University of Pennsylvania professor.
Voting by mail is popular in Pennsylvania because it means being able to receive the ballots at home and study them – there are several votes for national, state and municipal offices – and it avoids lines on a weekday. Until 2020, local Republicans and Democrats agreed to facilitate it. “It didn’t become a problem until the presidential candidate who didn’t win the election decided it was a problem,” says Ulrich, the director of PoliticsPA.
When?
In addition to the pace of counting, according to polls, the elections are close enough in Pennsylvania to even provoke a recount in this state beyond the usual statistical reviews or campaign requests. A difference of half a percentage point or less automatically triggers a statewide recount, that is, paid for by the taxpayer and without requiring a complaint from a politician or a voter.
So when will we know the outcome in Pennsylvania and perhaps the presidential election? “I’m pretty sure it will take a couple more days in Pennsylvania,” Ulrich answers. “All eyes will be on us for a long time. And we’re going to have to explain why we can’t do this faster.”
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