Pennsylvania: the battleground state most likely to take entire election with it

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In a presidential race with an extraordinary number of moving parts, election day finds Pennsylvania under intensifying scrutiny as the place where it could all come together – or fall spectacularly apart.

The state and its 20 electoral college votes are sitting at the center of a perfect storm. Polls show one of the tightest races among the battleground states between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Models project Pennsylvania as the state most likely, when it tips, to take the entire election with it.

The state also overhauled its election laws last year and is allowing no-excuse mail-in voting for the first time. There could be as many as 10 times as many mail-in votes as there were in 2016, Kathy Boockvar, the state’s top election official, said on Sunday.

Pennsylvania law also prohibits election officials from processing mail-in ballots until election day, which means it could take days to know the winner in the state, leaving a window for Trump to claim victory before all the votes are counted. Boockvar has said she’s confident the majority of votes will be counted by Friday.

It’s possible that the entire national election could encounter a physical bottleneck in Philadelphia, the state’s most populous city. Every mail-in ballot in the city – as many as 400,000 – is to be counted inside a cavernous convention center downtown using new equipment and newly trained staff observing social distancing measures.

The final tally in Philadelphia could swing the state result, which could swing the national result – but that tally will not be known for days, Philadelphia’s mayor, James Kenney, warned in an open letter Monday.

“Getting a tally of mail-in ballots will easily take several days,” Kenney wrote. “This may determine the outcome in Philadelphia, and in the Commonwealth as a whole. So, again, please be patient.”

Megan Smith, the co-founder of Better Civics, a voter engagement group, said she was concerned about the impact the president’s rhetoric would have on confidence in the election.

“My biggest concern is that people will see the returns coming in and start to get disappointed. When the reality is we’re not gonna know the answer,” she said, standing outside a satellite polling site in North Philadelphia where her organization was encouraging people to vote. “I’m also concerned that because so much misinformation has been put out there to make people believe that mail-in ballots have to be questioned that the outcome will be questioned.”

So far, at least 2.4 million voters have returned mail-in ballots in the state, according to data collected by the Guardian and ProPublica. Democrats have returned more than 1.5m of those ballots, while Republicans have returned about 555,000. A little over 262,000 people total voted by mail in Pennsylvania in the 2016 general election.

Still, there has been some confusion over the process and concern that voters in the state could have their ballots rejected over small mistakes like forgetting to sign their ballot or place their ballot in a required secrecy envelope. Party representatives from both sides will review the validity of mail-in ballots at the convention center in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

There is also a high-stakes legal fight playing out over whether or not ballots that arrive after election day should be counted. Pennsylvania usually requires mail-in ballots to be received by election night in order to count, but last month the Pennsylvania supreme court extended that deadline, ordering officials to count ballots postmarked by election day that arrived in the three days after. The US supreme court declined a Republican request to halt that ruling, but three of the court’s conservative justices wrote a dissent saying they believed it was probably unconstitutional and left open the possibility of ruling shortly after the election, which could invalidate thousands of ballots.

Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by less than one point – about 44,000 votes – and almost certainly needs to win it again to be re-elected. Biden has paths to victory that avoid the state, but a loss in Pennsylvania could hold ominous implications for his performance in neighboring states with similar demographics where he appears to be holding a stronger lead.

With a built-in guarantee that the Pennsylvania count will go long – and risks that Trump would use such a window to try to steal the election – any scenario in which the election result hinges on the state carries with it potential uncertainty and agitation. “He’s sowing the seeds of potential chaos, which is certainly inconsistent with his pretend, his feigned support of law enforcement,” Tom Ridge, a former Republican governor of the state, said of Trump in a phone interview.

Sonni King, a voter who dropped off her ballot at the same site, said she was tuning Trump out. “I’m not worried about Donald Trump at all,” she said “I’m not listening to him.”

The tightness of the race in Pennsylvania, and its national significance, has spilled over into tensions in the street in places with vocal Trump support and also a strong Democratic presence.

Frank Behum worked at Bethlehem Steel for 32 years and lives in the Lehigh valley, which splits evenly between the parties. A lifelong Democrat, the 73-year-old said somebody had stolen pro-Biden signs from his yard four different times this election cycle.

“There’s a lot of activity,” Behum said by phone. “We’ve had Trump rallies for the last 10 days around here. Blocking intersections with their ranting and raving and carrying on.

“They can do all of what they want. We know they’re only there to provoke incidents, and we’re not going to give them the chance. That’s the only reason they’re out there. They all know they’re getting their asses kicked.”

Polling averages depicted Biden with a roughly five-point lead in the state, slightly narrower than earlier gauges of the race and significantly narrower than margins in other Great Lakes states.

“But you know we thought the same thing in 2016, so how do you put the finger on this thing?” said Behum, who voted early by mail to avoid Republican voters without masks.

All four principals in the presidential race made final stops in Pennsylvania on Monday. Trump was to visit Scranton, Biden’s birthplace, with Vice-President Mike Pence visiting Erie across the state. Biden appeared in the Pittsburgh area, including one appearance with Lady Gaga, and his running mate, Kamala Harris, had a trio of events planned in eastern Pennsylvania culminating in an appearance with John Legend in Philadelphia.