Why mail-in ballots in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were counted so late
Early vote totals on Tuesday night in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin appeared to give President Donald Trump a comfortable edge over former Vice President Joe Biden.
But those numbers were never complete, and those tallies were changing overnight and into Wednesday as mail-in ballots from heavily Democratic areas in those states were counted.
A big reason for the delay: Laws in each state barred election officials from getting a head start on processing and counting the record number of mail-in ballots voters used amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Take Pennsylvania. The Republican-controlled legislature refused to change state law to allow county election officials to start processing mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. That left local election officials with mountains of absentee ballots to process and count on top of the in-person vote cast on Tuesday.
Overall, Pennsylvania received nearly 2.6 million mail-in ballots, according to the state's election website. Officials say that's 10 times the number of absentee ballots it receives in a normal election. In the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia alone, officials received more than 350,000 absentee ballots that they could not start processing until polls opened Tuesday.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/why-mail-in-ballots-in-michigan-wisconsin-and-pennsylvania-were-counted-so-late/ar-BB1aHdRP?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=DELLDHP
