Lehigh and Northampton counties certified their 2020 election results Monday, joining a slew of other Pennsylvania county election boards that certified results on the state deadline.
County election boards have until the third Monday following the election to certify their results — in essence turning unofficial results into official results — and send them to the state’s top election official for her approval.
Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar also must certify the results and then it goes to Gov. Tom Wolf’s office for his signature and certification of 20 electors.
With no more local votes left to count President-elect Joe Biden, a Democrat, leads Republican incumbent President Donald Trump in Lehigh County by 14,000 out of 186,000 total votes, and by 1,200 in Northampton County, where almost 172,000 ballots were cast.
“The Department of State continues to work closely with and support all 67 counties as they work to complete the election certification process,” spokesperson Wanda Murren said in a Monday morning email to reporters.
Vote certification is a routine, procedural step in the voting process, but it’s reached heightened importance in Pennsylvania this year due to a barrage of lawsuits filed by Trump in state and federal court.
Pennsylvania law requires Boockvar tabulate, compute and canvass votes for all races quickly, but does not set a specific deadline.
Boockvar then will inform Wolf of the results, and he will list the state’s electors for the Dec. 14 Electoral College meeting on a “certificate of ascertainment” sent to the national archivist. Four years ago, Wolf, a Democrat, made that notification Dec. 12.
Trump’s legal team has repeatedly tried to block official vote tallies and toss out mail-in ballots. On Monday the Republican president’s campaign sought a temporary restraining order to block the commonwealth from certifying its election results and thus cementing Biden’s capture of the state’s 20 electoral votes.
Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court on Monday said that more than 8,300 mail-in ballots in Philadelphia that had been challenged by the Trump campaign because of minor technical errors should be counted.
A voter’s failure to include a handwritten name, address or date by their declaration on the outer envelope, the court said, does not “warrant the wholesale disenfranchisement of thousands of Pennsylvania voters.”
Currently, Biden is leading Trump by about 81,000 votes out of almost 7 million cast in Pennsylvania. He’s projected to beat Trump in the Electoral College 306 to 232 votes.
On Dec. 14, electors in the Electoral College vote by paper ballot in their respective states. Those are delivered by Dec. 23. On Jan. 6, the U.S. House and Senate hold a joint hearing to count the electoral votes. The candidate with at least 270 wins; if neither gets to that point, then the House decides the election.
On Jan. 20, the president-elect will be sworn into office.
Michigan election officials on Monday certified Biden’s 154,000-vote victory in the state amid Trump’s brazen attempts to subvert the election results.
Under Michigan law, Biden claims all 16 electoral votes. Biden won by 2.8 percentage points — a larger margin than in other states where Trump is contesting the results like Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Some Trump allies had expressed hope that state lawmakers could intervene in selecting Republican electors in states that do not certify. That long-shot bid is no longer possible in Michigan.
Trump’s efforts to stave off the inevitable — formal recognition of his defeat — faced increasingly stiff resistance from the courts and fellow Republicans with just three weeks to go until the Electoral College meets to certify Biden’s victory. Time and again, Trump’s challenges and baseless allegations of widespread conspiracy and fraud have been met with rejection as states move forward with confirming their results.
Trump’s federal lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s results was dismissed Saturday by a conservative, Republican judge who shot down the Trump campaign’s biggest legal effort in the state with a scathing ruling that questioned why he was supposed to disenfranchise 7 million voters with no evidence to back their claims and an inept legal argument at best.
The Trump campaign has appealed to the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The large number of votes cast by mail, and the large number of provisional ballots that were cast, have been a challenge for vote counters across the state.
In Berks County, which includes Reading, officials do not expect to report to Boockvar until Wednesday, because that is when a five-working-day review period will close.
Monday was also a deadline under state law for legal challenges to contest any election to be filed.
The state department estimates that almost 71% of Pennsylvania’s voting-age population participated in the election, either by voting in person or casting mail-in ballots, breaking a record set in 1960.
Locally, 71.4% of Northampton County’s voting-age population cast ballots this year, while almost 65% of Lehigh County eligible voters participated.
Voter turnout was especially important in this presidential election as relatively few counties appear to have flipped for either candidate. NPR reports that so far, only 77 counties in the country switched from 2016; Biden won 59, including Northampton and Erie counties, the only two in Pennsylvania to pivot this year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com.
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