Matt Slocum/AP Photo
Chester County election workers process mail-in and absentee ballots at West Chester University, November 4, 2020, in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Downingtown, Pennsylvania, resident Macy Watkins, a first-time poll worker, supported Joe Biden. Seventeen-year-olds can’t vote in Chester County, but a Pennsylvania statute already on the books allowed students like Watkins, a high school senior, to assist at voting locations—which helped election officials after the pandemic sidelined many older poll workers who are more susceptible to COVID-19. Watkins is cautiously optimistic that Biden will pull off a victory in her home county, one of the must-carry areas that is critical to Democratic hopes in the Keystone State.
The four historically purple “collar counties” surrounding Philadelphia—Chester, Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware—may decide whether deeply divided Pennsylvania gives 20 electoral votes to President Trump or puts Joe Biden in the White House. Pennsylvania’s collar counties look to be solidly in the Biden column: Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Biden is leading by a wider margin than Clinton in 2016 in all four counties. But either way, county election officials are already dealing with a flood of litigation—just as promised.
According to Chester County Commissioner Josh Maxwell, 66 lawsuits had been filed in Pennsylvania by the Republican Party or the Trump campaign by early Thursday. Maxwell says that all Chester County ballots received before 8 p.m. on Election Day have been counted. The rest—provisional, military, and ballots postmarked after November 3—will be counted by Friday. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Thursday that Biden leads by 17 points countywide. “The expectation, mathematically, is that Joe Biden’s going to win Chester County by a wide margin,” says Maxwell.
The four historically purple “collar counties” surrounding Philadelphia may decide whether Pennsylvania gives 20 electoral votes to President Trump or puts Joe Biden in the White House.
With the election hanging in the balance, Maxwell, one of the three Chester County commissioners, says that poll workers and election officials have been “extraordinarily careful” and have been relying on continuously updated guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of State.
Chester County, as Maxwell explains, was a “ruby-red, Mitt Romney, fiscal conservative stronghold” in years past. But this year’s results may paint a different picture. Though Delaware and Montgomery Counties have been strongly Democratic for the past few cycles, Bucks and Chester were the toss-ups.
Yet one pending lawsuit in suburban Montgomery County (where Biden leads by 26 percentage points) demonstrates how Republicans up and down the ballot will leverage the courts to discredit the results. In Pennsylvania’s Fourth Congressional District, incumbent Democratic House member Madeleine Dean faces a challenge from Republican Kathy Barnette. The Associated Press called the race for Dean. “I told y’all, I’m not rolling over for felonious foolishness and dishonesty,” Barnette said in a Facebook post.
U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Savage in Philadelphia was less convinced of “felonious foolishness.” Politico reported that Barnette’s team argued that since election officials allowed voters to “cure” ballots on Election Day—for example, reaching out to mail-in or absentee voters and allowing them to correct problems with the Pennsylvania secrecy ballot they’d cast or check on signature inconsistencies—this amounted to election fraud.
Savage pointed out that election officials were permitting voters to exercise their voting rights, noting that the “legislative intent of the statute we are talking about [is] to franchise, not disenfranchise, voters.” (And, as of Thursday night, the plaintiffs in the case were attempting to withdraw the suit.)
Meanwhile, restrictive mail-in voting laws passed by Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature earlier this year prohibit “pre-canvassing”—opening and counting ballots prior to Election Day. Many of these GOP lawsuits delve into the minutiae of Pennsylvania’s voting regulations: Are there “naked” ballots that were mailed in without a secrecy envelope? Were ballots “pre-canvassed” before Election Day? Are ballots that were received after the polls closed segregated from the other batches?
With a primarily Democratic crop of mail-in ballots still to be counted, the margins between Biden and Trump may continue to shrink; however, election officials expect that the presidential race will be called by Friday at the latest. But the lawsuits are likely to keep coming in Pennsylvania’s collar counties.
