Pennsylvania, unlike other states, doesn’t begin counting their mail ballots until election night.
It’s a slow process. Signatures have to be matched, envelopes opened, and ballots removed and fed into the scanning machines.
There are millions of these ballots, it’s done by hand, and it takes time. This means Pennsylvania’s mail-in returns will come in during the night and into the next day.
Right now, nobody knows who will win Pennsylvania. The polls are close. There’s a good chance Trump will have a lead on election night, even if he loses in the state, because Republicans tend to vote at polling places, and those votes are reported first. Trump being who he is, he’ll declare he won Pennsylvania.
But he’ll be lying; no one will know who won that state until the mail ballots are tallied and reported. Democrats tend to vote by mail, so those votes likely will favor Harris. And if the mail-in returns change the election night result, which they very well might, that doesn’t mean the election is being stolen in Pennsylvania.
It only means Republican votes were counted first, and Democratic votes were added to the totals later. It’s normal, it’s legal, it’s routine; but Trump’s supporters don’t understand this about Pennsylvania elections.
So when Trump’s initial lead narrows and then vanishes, they will be angry that votes are still being counted. But think about this: Every legal voter — you, me, our neighbors, not just them — has a God-given right to vote and have their votes counted.
It’s profoundly offensive for people whose votes have already been counted to demand counting stop before all votes are counted. That’s saying their neighbors don’t have a right to a say in who leads our country. Anyone who interferes with the counting will be committing a crime under Pennsylvania’s laws.
People who don’t like how our elections work should consider moving to a country where they don’t have democratic elections. They won’t have this problem there, and they’ll know who the winner is even before the election is held.