Pennsylvania Election Results Updates: Joe Biden Wins Pennsylvania, The Presidency
By: KDKA-TV News Staff
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- All eyes were on the battleground state of Pennsylvania as more ballots are being counted.
Former VP Joe Biden started to come back from what once started as a huge lead for President Trump and has now won Pennsylvania and the presidency as of Saturday morning.
In Pennsylvania, the report comes with 95% of votes counted, according to CBS News.
The Trump and Biden campaigns see the commonwealth's 20 electoral votes as essential to clinch victory.
Since 2008, every presidential candidate to win in Pennsylvania has won the presidency.
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NOVEMBER 7
11:30 a.m. - Democratic nominee Joe Biden has won the presidency with 273 electoral votes, CBS News reports.
9:00 a.m. - Counting has resumed at the Elections Division's warehouse on the North Side. The ballots being counted are the approximately 29,000 from voters who received wrong ones last month.
NOVEMBER 6
8:47 p.m. - The state's election results page was temporarily down. An error message was displayed on www.electionreturns.pa.gov.
The message read: "As part of the Department of States ongoing commitment to optimize services, this website is currently unavailable because we are performing maintenance activities. The application will be available as soon as our maintenance is completed. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the Bureau of Election Security and Technology at 717-787-5280."
8:05 p.m. - Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has issued an order that state election officials should comply with Kathy Boockvar's guidance that all ballots received after 8 p.m. on Election Day should be segregated and the ballots, if counted, should be counted separately.
4:10 p.m. - Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania's secretary of state, said the "overwhelming majority" of the state's mail-in ballots and absentee ballots have been counted and the process of counting provisional ballots has begun.
"Pennsylvania counties have been incredibly hard at work canvassing all the ballots to provide accurate results as quickly as possible following best practices and responsibilities pursuant to state and federal law," Boockvar said in a release. "We are very thankful to all the election officials working extremely long hours to make our democracy work and ensure that every qualified voter's vote is counted safely and securely."
1:05 p.m. - There are still tens of thousands of ballots in Allegheny County not yet counted.
The process has been underway inside the election warehouse in the North Side for hours. All of the workers, about 80, are with the return board. There are authorized representatives from both parties, and they've been walking around and keeping a close eye on the process.
The board will examine 6,800 ballots that have "issues," like if for example they got damaged or were missing a secrecy envelope, also known as a "naked" ballot.
Meanwhile, Allegheny County Executive Fitzgerald says there are about 29,000 ballots that have been ordered by a federal court to not be handled or processed until 5 p.m. Friday.
7:45 a.m. - In an appearance on CBS This Morning, Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey pushed back against President Trump's claims of voter fraud in Pennsylvania.
"I am not aware of any signifcant fraud, any signifcant wrongdoing," Sen. Toomey said. "If it's happened, then the evidence needs to come out. we need to go to court, we need to punish the wrongdoers, we need to redress whatever went wrong. But I'm not aware of any such evidence."
On Thursday, a judge threw out a lawsuit by the Trump campaign attempting to halt the counting of votes in Pennsylvania, specifically Philadelphia.
7:00 a.m. - Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman joined Your Day Pittsburgh to talk about the state of the race in Pennsylvania.
"It's math at this point," Fetterman said. "There's 160,000 outstanding mail-in ballots, there is not one single county or region of Pennsylvania where they are not breaking heavily toward the vice president's favor, minimum 60-40, and some places out of Philadelphia, that goes up to 90-10. It doesn't take much just to do basic, back-of-the-envelope calculations and realize that you are going to be blowing through that modest cushion of 18,000-odd votes and go into the category for Joe Biden at some point today."
WATCH: Interview With Lt. Gov. John Fetterman
Fetterman said he believes at this point that Joe Biden winning Pennsylvania at this point is a "mathematical inevitability."
NOVEMBER 5
8:50 a.m. - Former Vice President Joe Biden has taken the lead over President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.
As of 8:50 a.m., Biden has a 5,587 lead over President Trump.
8:00 p.m. - The Trump campaign tried to stop the vote count in Philadelphia — alleging city officials were depriving their observers of meaningful access — but a federal judge refused to go along, instead urging the sides to forge an agreement.
U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond, an appointee of GOP President George W. Bush, told the Trump campaign and city officials to work it out. He expressed exasperation as lawyers bickered about which side was following the rules.
"Really, can't we be responsible adults here and reach an agreement on how far all observers are allowed to stand?" said Diamond, suggesting each party be allowed 60 observers inside a hall at the downtown Philadelphia convention center where the ballots are being tallied. - The Associated Press.
6:50 p.m. - Pennsylvania Secretary Of State Kathy Boockvar said Thursday evening we're in the "homestretch" when it comes to counting the state's millions of ballots. At an evening press conference, she stopped short of saying we'll have a final count today. Earlier on CNN, she said we'll have the "overwhelming majority" of ballots counted by Thursday.
2:56 p.m. - Pennsylvania Secretary Of State Kathy Boockvar says the "overwhelming majority" of ballots will be counted by Thursday.
According to the state's dashboard, as of 1:27 p.m., about 369,000 mail-in ballots remained.
"They're coming in — we're getting 10,000 here, 20,000 here. Counties are furiously at work and it's looking like we're ahead of schedule," Boockvar told CNN on Thursday. "I've been saying that we'll have the overwhelming majority counted by tomorrow, but it's looking like we'll have the overwhelming majority counted by today."
2:35 p.m. - The race for Pennsylvania attorney general once again has incumbent Josh Shapiro in the lead.
2:03 p.m. - There are 29,000 ballots in Allegheny County that can't be counted until Friday because of a court order, County Executive Rich Fitzgerald says.
He says there's approximately 35,000 mail-in ballots that need to be looked at. Out of those, about 29,000 ballots have been ordered by federal court to not be handled or processed until 5 p.m. Friday. These 29,000 ballots were originally sent out by the county's third-party mailing company with the wrong information.
12:35 p.m. - Pennsylvania reported it still had hundreds of thousands of ballots left to count Thursday as Democrat Joe Biden and President Donald Trump fought to the end for the White House.
Some of the state's most heavily populated locales, including Montgomery and Chester counties in the Philadelphia suburbs, reported finishing their tallies. The counting continued in Philadelphia and in other counties throughout Pennsylvania two days after Election Day. - Associated Press.
11:44 a.m. — President Trump secured a legal victory as a Philadelphia lower court decided that poll watchers are now allowed to be within 6 feet of ballot counting at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, rather than the previous 20-foot perimeter.
7:45 a.m. - Allegheny County announced they have finished tallying the most of its mail-in ballots just before 10:30 p.m. Wednesday night.
Thursday morning will be an "administrative activities" day at the Allegheny County Elections Warehouse.
There are still more votes to go.
Friday, the Return Board will come to the warehouse to examine uncounted ballots.
In addition to the 29,000 ballots that were mailed out incorrectly, they will also look at ballots that were unscannable either due to being ripped, torn, or folded.
There are also 4,350 ballots that have to be sorted because of miscellaneous issues. They were either naked without the secrecy envelope or did not have a date filled out when they were returned.
7:12 a.m. — Nearly all the ballots in Montgomery County have been counted Thursday morning. Montgomery County Commissioner Ken Lawrence Jr. says all eligible ballots received by 8 p.m. on Election Day have been counted. Any military, overseas and other ballots determined eligible will be added later.
5:50 a.m. — Election officials in Philadelphia say workers at the Pennsylvania Convention Center have now counted more than half of the mail-in ballots in Philadelphia. That's more than 233,000 of them, but that means they still have more than 100,000 to go. An updated count is expected later Thursday morning.
Mail-in ballots are heavily favoring former Vice President Joe Biden, and President Trump's lead continues to shrink in Pennsylvania.
NOVEMBER 4
11:30 p.m. - In Westmoreland County, ballots are still being counted. Election workers were about halfway through the stack of mail-in ballots as of Wednesday night and the process is expected to take awhile.
Provisional ballots will still need to be counted. Those ballots are counted by a bipartisan board that won't meet until Friday.
