If PA was not allowed to open mail-in ballots prior to election day, how did they know on Nov 2 the breakdown of D vs R already received? Do they have indications on the envelopes or ??
More than 2.4 million Pennsylvania mail-in ballots returned by Monday morning
More than 2.4 million Pennsylvania voters returned mail-in ballots by Monday morning, including ballots from nearly 1.6 million Democrats and more than 550,000 Republicans, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said.
She spoke on the eve of the first presidential election since Pennsylvania last year enacted a sweeping reform of its election laws, including a vast expansion of mail-in balloting.
Boockvar said the 2.4 million ballots returned to counties accounted for more than 78% of the 3.08 million mail-in applications that were confirmed by the state.
Among those returned by Monday morning were nearly 1.6 million from Democratic voters, 555,805 from Republicans and 262,349 from independents and others.
For comparison, in the 2016 presidential election, there were 266,208 absentee ballots cast, and the number in 2012 was 248,561.
Boockvar, responding to questions about problems with mail-in ballots, said that any frustrated mail-in voter has the option to “go to your polling place on Election Day and vote by provisional ballot.”
“Don’t give up,” she said.
Boockvar cautioned against putting stock in unsubstantiated claims of victory in a race before sufficient votes are counted.
“Even in normal years, and nothing about this year has been normal, you know, it takes time for votes to be counted,” she said. “Elections are never called — they are never finished — on election night, and certainly we’ve never had 2.5 to 3 million mail ballots to count before.”
Factors including the massive number of mail-in ballots have led a handful of counties to say they would not count those ballots until after Tuesday.
Boockvar said representatives of her office and Gov. Tom Wolf have talked to officials in the counties where mail-in counting has become an issue. She reiterated her position that counties should start working on mail-in ballots as soon as possible on Election Day.
Boockvar did not name all counties involved. She identified Cumberland as the largest, but said as a group they had only a tiny fraction of the more than 2.5 million mail-in ballots that are expected.
She said, “Their ballots are not going to change the course of when the ballots are going to be fully counted in Pennsylvania.”
https://www.mcall.com/news/elections/mc-nws-elections-mail-boockvar-20201102-6awkgylir5dwxlwpklrclhk6su-story.html