State law in PA prohibits counting mail in and absentee ballots until elections day.
The Keystone and Badger states each prohibit election officials from beginning to open and count absentee ballots until 7 a.m. Election Day, when they must also deal with in-person voting.
The Pennsylvania State Secretary's office describes it this way on its website: "Hundreds of thousands – sometimes millions – of mail ballots are cast in every election, and current state law does not permit counties to begin opening these ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. That means county election officials cannot even remove the ballots from the envelopes and prepare them to be scanned until that time – on a day when those same officials are also running more than 9,000 polling places across the state."
While the nation's eyes Tuesday night will be on a handful of swing states expected to determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, it may not be known for days who won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. State laws governing when ballots can be processed in those states may mean a repeat of 2020, when it wasn't until the Saturday after the election that Pennsylvania's results gave Democratic nominee Joe Biden the votes needed to secure a majority in the Electoral College.
In response to that days-long wait, many states overhauled their election laws to make it faster to count vote by mail, absentee and overseas ballots. While Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are often lumped with Michigan in the "blue wall" of Rust Belt swing states, they now differ in one important way: Michigan allows election workers to begin tabulating mailed-in ballots more than a week before Election Day, though the results cannot be revealed until after the polls close.
Local election clerks in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have repeatedly pushed state lawmakers since 2020 to allow preprocessing, said Lawrence Norden, Vice President of the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
In "Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, the election officials have been begging for years, and certainly since 2020, to allow them to process mail ballots earlier, the way they do in most of the other battleground states, so that on election night they just press a button and can have the results. Their state legislatures wouldn't do it," he said.
Because the state legislatures didn't act, local officials have sought to solve the problem on their own.
A tin of I Voted stickers catch the early morning light just as the polls open at 7 a.m. at the Chatham Community Center.
It was pretty quiet at the Chatham Community Center just after the polls opened at 7 a.m. on primary election day, Sept. 3, 2024. Town Clerk Julie Smith said that about 32 residents had cast their ballots during early voting. About 550 mail-in ballots were returned of the approximately 1,400 that were sent out, she said.
Did you know Arizona law gives election official about 2 weeks for counting.
https://whyy.org/articles/election-mail-in-ballot-absentee-count/
Forbes reports,
Pennsylvania: The state will be one of the slowest to release results from mail-in ballots because officials can’t start processing absentee ballots—taking steps like removing ballots from envelopes and verifying voter signatures—until the morning of Election Day, and cannot record any vote totals until after polls close at 8 p.m.
Did you Vote? Why we may not know election results right away
How was your voting experience?
How long did it take you?
#election , #election2024
#Novemberfive
#november,
#electionresults
#electionday
#uselections
#trumpharris
#election
#election2024
#remember
#fifthofnovember
#november
#uselection
#electionday
#trumpharris
election
us election
trump harris
november fifth
november 5th
#november5th
election results
#presedentialelections
presidential election
#USpresident
us president
#pennsylvania
#wisconsin
#keystonestate
#badgerstate
#battlegroundstates
battleground states
Did you Vote? Why we may not know election results right away!
https://rumble.com/v5m96at-did-you-vote-why-we-may-not-know-election-results-right-away.html