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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Pennsylvania resident here. It's not an early call. In 2020 the state wasn't called until Friday iirc. Pennsylvania doesn't start counting mail in ballots until election day and in most places doesn't start counting them until the direct polling is turned in.
This is because prior to the last election we had for-cause mail-in voting only and the number of mail-in ballots was always too small to affect the outcome. The counting law hasn't caught up with the realities of at-will mail-in voting. Granted, local elections boards are more prepared than they were so it should go faster than 2020 but you should abandon the idea of knowing who won Pennsylvania before you got to bed on Tuesday, unless Harris is already way ahead.
The margin of this election will almost certainly be smaller than the number of outstanding mail-in ballots. That means we'll have to wait for them to be counted just like 2020. Also mail in ballots heavily favor Dems, so in any close race you should expect Trump to be well ahead on Tuesday night and slowly lose ground as the mail-in tallies come in.
The other part of this that absolutely everyone should be aware of is there is a real problem with the current mail-in process in Pennsylvania regarding ballot curing. There are a bunch of rules about how ballots must be mailed in (signatures placement/quality date placement/formatting, envelope types, etc) and how to handle improperly submitted ballots is mostly being left to local elections boards. That means some of them are offering ballot curing, where you can go and fix the issue and have your vote counted, some of them are simply counting the ballots without regard to minor clerical issues, and some of them are throwing out every mail-in for even the slightest technical violation. There are already lawsuits by Republicans trying to establish a precedent that forces all counties into the latter group. State courts have taken a dim view of this position—opting to protect curing and the franchise, but the local federal appeals court has just ruled in the Republicans favor this week, asserting counties are within their rights to discard ballots for minor defects.
This is a bomb waiting to go off and there is a very real chance we're going to reach a point where Pennsylvania's electoral votes are going to be handed to a candidate by a court choosing which mail-in votes count and which don't. There is also a very real chance that SCOPA and SCOTUS both issue rulings with opposing answers.