Update: As of Friday morning at 9 a.m. EST, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, after previously trailing, surpassed President Donald Trump by 5,594 votes according to the Associated Press.
PHILADELPHIA (NewsNation Now) — Pennsylvania had hundreds of thousands of ballots left to count Thursday, but the state’s elections chief signaled the number was expected to dwindle rapidly as Democrat Joe Biden and President Donald Trump fought to the end for the White House.
Some of the state’s most heavily populated locales, including Montgomery and Chester counties in the Philadelphia suburbs, reported finishing their tallies. The Trump campaign asked a federal judge to stop the count in Philadelphia itself, alleging city officials were depriving their observers of meaningful access. There was no immediate ruling.
As of Thursday night at 11 p.m. EST, there are roughly 176,000 ballots left to count, or 7% of the total mail in ballots.
Pennsylvania’s governor, Tom Wolf, was scheduled to hold a news conference Thursday at noon but canceled it 30 minutes before.
The Associated Press has not declared a winner in Pennsylvania’s presidential contest because the race between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden is too early to call.
NewsNation’s television broadcast and digital properties relies on the AP for all vote counting and race calls. NewsNation chose to rely on the AP because they call races based on the facts.
NewsNation affiliate WHTM confirmed that the Pennsylvania governor canceled a previously planned election update.
Trump and Biden are hotly contesting Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, with both campaigns seeing a victory in the state as crucial to their chances of winning the White House.
Hundreds of thousands of votes were still to be counted in Pennsylvania, and Trump’s campaign said it was moving to intervene in existing Supreme Court litigation over counting mail-in ballots there. The campaign also argued that outstanding votes still could flip the outcome in Arizona, which went for Biden, showcasing an inconsistency in its arguments over prolonged tabulation.
The Trump campaign filed the lawsuit in Pennsylvania Wednesday, seeking to pause vote count in key battlegrounds, according to the Associated Press. His campaign also filed lawsuits Wednesday in Georgia and Michigan and announced it would ask for a recount in Wisconsin, a state The Associated Press called for Democrat Joe Biden Wednesday afternoon.
Boockvar Wednesday morning said the state is approaching 50% of mail ballots counted and vowed that every vote will be tallied before results are announced.
Several states allow mailed-in votes to be accepted after Election Day as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday. That includes Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can be accepted if they arrive up to three days later.
As of Thursday morning, President Donald Trump has 214 Electoral College votes to Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s 264 as of the latest AP race call of Michigan for Biden.
The states that have not been called by the Associated Press are Nevada, North Carolina, Alaska, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
