Pennsylvania’s governor resisted a war of words with President Donald Trump, instead moving to assure voters that their votes are being counted. Trump’s early-morning news conference brought several points that are being challenged, not the least of which was to suggest irregularities and an effort by his opponents to steal the election.
“We still have over 1 million mail ballots to count in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf tweeted. “I promised Pennsylvanians that we would count every vote and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Trump claimed to have already won the election despite millions of ballots not having been counted. “We were getting ready to win this election,” he said at the White House. “Frankly, we did win this election.”
Neither Trump nor former Vice President Joe Biden had reached the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency as of 11 a.m. ET Wednesday.
At a Wednesday news conference in Harrisburg, Pa., Wolf assured a legitimate result, and urged further patience and support from voters before adding a warning: “Make no mistake, our democracy is being tested in this election.”
Katy Boockvar, the Pennsylvania secretary of state, addressed the lawsuits possibly threatening her state. “Basically, what you know that’s been publicly reported, that’s really all we have at this point,” she said at the news conference. “And I can’t talk about active litigation, unfortunately.”
Boockvar also said there were no problems with the vote-counting process. “It’s one of the smoothest, least-issues presidential elections that I’ve seen in any time that I can possibly remember. And I’ve been in, around elections for a long time as a voting rights lawyer and a poll worker. This was incredibly smooth. “As Governor Wolf said, we are going to count every single ballot.”
As of mid-morning, Trump, with more than 3 million votes, was holding a lead in Pennsylvania with more than 500,000 with 78% of the votes in and more than a million yet to be counted.
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