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Decided to do a quick thread on what election night might look like in Pennsylvania. (1/?)
Roughly 2.5 million people have voted by mail so far in PA. Of those, 68% are Ds, 22% are Rs, and 10% are Independent. Polling has shown that Independents are breaking towards Biden, and a higher percentage of Republicans are voting Biden than Democrats voting Trump.
However, for this exercise, we will assume that everyone votes down party lines and Independents are split 50/50. This means that prior to the election, there will be 1,825,000 Biden and 675,000 Trump votes.
In 2016, a total of 6,115,402 people voted in PA. Due to relative apathy surrounding the 2016 election and very strong feelings towards this one, I am going to assume this number gets blown out of the water and 7,000,000 people vote this year.
This means that for Trump to win, he will have to eclipse the 1,150,000 vote lead that Biden is carrying to election day. In other words, Biden could lose by 1,125,000 votes on election day (62.5%/37.5%) and still win PA by 25k votes (Trump won PA by 44k votes in 2016 for ref).
Now this is where things get interesting. Unlike most states, PA law does not allow officials to start processing early ballots until 7 a.m. on election day. Some counties (incl Butler, Beaver, and Mercer) have stated they will not be counting ANY mail-in ballots until Nov 4th.
Even though most of the counties will be counting mail-ins on the 3rd, it will likely be difficult to do so due to high voter turnout and the lengthier processes of spoiling mail in ballots for people deciding to vote in person and filling out of provisional ballots.
PA is also dealing with a new paper voting system that some poll workers and voters who did not vote in the primary in person may not be familiar with.
This all leads to the potential for the majority of mails to not be counted on election day. There really is no way of knowing exactly how many mails will be counted. But for this exercise, I am going to assume only 35% of mails are counted and that all in-person votes are.
In this scenario where Biden wins PA by 25,000 votes, Trump will be leading by a landslide on election night: 700,000 votes or 56.7% to 43.3%. Even if 75% of mail-in ballots are counted, which seems very unlikely, Trump will be leading by over 250,000 votes, or 52.1% to 47.9%.
Trump has already stated that he wants to stop counting votes after Nov 3rd. This, of course, is because he knows that he is losing mail-in votes by a substantial margin. Trump will very likely try to claim victory in PA on election night. Do not let yourself fall into that trap.
Every mail in ballot deserves to be counted. 538 polling average currently has Biden up 5% in PA with no real signs of tightening. Hillary was only up 3.4% at this point in 2016, and there are far fewer undecided voters this year.
None of this is to say that Trump can't win PA. He absolutely can. (15% chance by 538 vs. 23% chance in 2016) What this is saying is that Biden could very easily be down big on election night and still come back to win.
The election night results are not final, and there is nothing in US or PA law that says the election results must be released on election night. In order to preserve our Democracy, every single vote must be counted.
*Disclaimer: I did not include any 3rd party candidates to make this as easy as possible to digest. These numbers are not meant to be taken literally, but are more a way of illustrating the general concept*
