UPDATED: 4:53 p.m.
PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — County elections officials did not stop their count of mail-in ballots overnight, vowing to keep going until every vote is counted.
It could be days before enough of those votes are counted to call the winner of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes. There is no firm timeline.
The count in Philadelphia
“We’ll be done as soon as we’re done. We want to make sure every vote that is legitimately cast, and is good, it gets counted. That’s what normally happens in elections," Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt said.
According to Schmidt, there are hundreds of thousands left to go in Philadelphia alone. They are still being counted at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where officials say they were able to tackle 65,000 more overnight.
That operation is visible to the public via live video feed.
The City Commissioner’s office says 233,500 mail-in ballots have been counted so far — just more than half of the total received. In the city, Joe Biden has about 78% of the vote, with 22% for the president.
Biden is showing an advantage with mail-in votes. Out of the last 45,000 counted, he received close to 41,000.
Asked about the president questioning the process, Schmidt, a Republican, said, “Counting votes cast on or before Election Day, by eligible voters, is not cheating. It’s democracy," he said.
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City Commissioner Lisa Deeley emphasized that the mail-in ballot processing has been completely transparent.
“All parties who are on the ballot in Philadelphia have had campaign observers in the Convention Center to view the counting operation,” she said. The Trump campaign filed suit Wednesday afternoon to “temporarily halt” the vote count in Pennsylvania due to what it says is a lack of transparency.
“With that said,” she continued, “we also plan to continue to follow all applicable state election laws, including those who are able to access the pre-canvass and canvass operation area.”
Deeley said she feels very comfortable with the progress made so far, but she has no idea when the operation will be completed. Her No. 1 priority is to conduct a safe, open and fair election.
So, the fate of the presidency hangs in the balance, as President Donald Trump and Biden fight for Pennsylvania and other key battleground states, including Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Nevada. Biden's lead in Michigan has widened, with 92% of the vote in.
There are several ways Trump or Biden could win the election by winning the states that are too close or too early to call. Neither candidate has yet to hit the 270 count needed.
The count in Pennsylvania
The president leads in Pennsylvania by about 530,000 votes. But many of the ballots that remain to be counted are mail-ins. Biden has generally performed strongest with mail-in ballots across the map — and generally in strong Democratic areas.
How many votes are outstanding, and when will they be counted? Counties are generally showing more accurate results than the state's website. Counties in the Philadelphia area show Biden with a 428,000 vote advantage over Trump. Bucks is the only county where Trump has a lead.
The Biden campaign claims the electoral math is adding up in its favor. Campaign manager Jen Dillon said there are not enough outstanding votes to overcome Biden’s leads in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. And in Pennsylvania, she said, the votes that haven’t been counted yet will erase the president’s lead.
“We see 1.4 million outstanding ballots that will be counted over the coming days, most of them projected to be from Democratic-heavy areas and mail-in votes,” she said. “We expect that these ballots will more than overcome Trump’s 600,000 vote margin that he’s carrying right now.”
The Trump campaign disagrees. Campaign manager Bill Stepien said even if Philadelphia goes overwhelmingly for Biden, the president would still win the state by 40,000 votes.
“We know there are a number of pro-Trump, Trump country-type counties with a lot of ballots still to be counted,” he added.
Stepien said the campaign believes the president is in a good position to win re-election.
But going into the election, Pennsylvania knew that counts may last until as late as Friday.
Gov. Tom Wolf, in his briefing Wednesday, came out swinging, saying his administration is going to do all it can to keep outside influence, whatever it may be, from interfering with the state's efforts to get a fair and accurate count of every vote legitimately cast.
"This is a stress test on the ideals upon which this country was founded. And the basic rule of 'one person, one vote' — that still carries, and it has to carry here," Wolf said.
Unlike in many states, Pennsylvania counties were not allowed to pre-canvass mail-in ballots, that is, open the envelopes and flatten and prepare the ballots for scanning. It's a tedious and time-consuming process.
Republicans in the state Legislature are blaming Democrats for the delay, saying the House passed a bill that would have allowed for time to prepare mail-in ballots. But Democrats say that legislation would have also banned drop boxes for those ballots, which was a non-starter, as Wolf vowed to veto it.
Counties that wanted weeks to prepare ballots received zero.
Other state races
There is still no call in the contested congressional race in Bucks County, but the incumbent, Republican Brian Fitzpatrick, has a 63-36 percentage point lead over Christina Finello.
Democrats Dwight Evans, Mary Gay Scanlon, Brendan Boyle and Madeleine Dean won re-election.
A pair of Democratic incumbents, Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Treasurer Joe Torsella, sought re-election, while Pennsylvanians also voted for a new auditor general to replace term-limited Democrat Eugene DePasquale.
Control of the state House was also at stake. Democrats went into the election needing nine seats to seize the majority from Republicans after a decade out of power, but lost at least one incumbent in early returns. First-term Rep. Wendy Ullman of Bucks County in the Philadelphia suburbs was defeated by Republican Shelby Labs.
Democrats also saw hopes of regaining a state Senate majority become dimmer.
Stay with KYW Newsradio for updates throughout the day.