Election officials in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County announced early Wednesday they have suspended vote counting and that they expect to resume tabulating votes at around 10 a.m. on Wednesday, as the race for the White House narrows to several key battleground states.
Local news outlets WPXI and WESA reported the announcement by officials in the county, which includes Pittsburgh.
Pennsylvania is one of four key battleground states—along with Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin—which began Wednesday with tens of thousands of absentee ballots uncounted.
Allegheny County has a population of 1.2 million people. It is the state’s second-most populous county.
Allegheny County went for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Thad Hall, the elections director in Mercer County, was cited by the outlet as saying his staff will begin counting absentee votes on Wednesday, citing other priorities on Election Day.
“I have to be in a position to spend my day addressing the needs of my Election Day voters and then once we are done with that, then we’ll turn to addressing the mail-in ballots,” he said.
Holly Brandon, the elections director in Montour County, said staff and space limitations drove the decision not to tabulate mail-in votes until Wednesday and blamed the state legislature for the delay, telling the Post-Gazette that by refusing to allow pre-canvassing ahead of Election Day, they “created this monster.”
Pennsylvania’s top elections official Kathy Boockvar said last week she would push counties to tabulate votes quickly but that the decision on processing votes would ultimately be up to them.
“The outcome of Tuesday’s election could well depend on Pennsylvania,” Boockvar said, according to the Post-Gazette. “It is vitally important that the more than 3 million ballots cast by mail here be counted as soon as possible. The country will be looking to Pennsylvania for accurate and timely results.”
Attention has focused on Pennsylvania, which has emerged as a key battleground state in a White House race still too close to call. Officials have warned repeatedly that results in the closely watched state might be delayed because of the surge of mail-in ballots this year.
Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, said in an early Wednesday statement that the state still has over 1 million mail ballots left to count.
“I promised Pennsylvanians that we would count every vote and that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.