waiting on let's listen full faith that
we will similarly
meet this moment and i will do
everything within my power
to ensure that the results are fair and
that every vote is counted
pennsylvania will have a fair election
and that election will be free of
outside
influences i will vigorously and we
all will vigorously defend against any
attempt
to attack that vote in pennsylvania
and every pennsylvania every
pennsylvanian can have confidence in the
outcome of this election
due to the diligence of the county
election officials and the hard work of
secretary brookvar
and her folks at the pennsylvania
department of state so thank you again
to
all pennsylvanians who voted rest
assured your vote
will be counted if it hasn't already
been counted your vote
will make a difference in this election
this is the way
we elect our officials this is the way
we hire the people who are our public
servants
uh it's a promise that we give to all
pennsylvanians all americans that their
vote counts
and i intend to keep that promise here
in pennsylvania now i'm proud to turn
this over to
secretary of state kathy bookfar
sorry that's it
good morning
so i want to echo some of what governor
wolf said about once again
thanking all the uh you know tens of
thousands if not hundreds of thousands
of election workers that were were
and are still involved in the process of
enabling this great democracy in
pennsylvania and across the nation
the work they have done and continue to
do is just
tremendous and you know i i still we've
been talking
department of state folks uh were you
know
at our operations center i don't know
4 4 30 in the morning went to take a
shower and
we're back within a couple hours of that
so it's been working around the clock as
are many of the counties
and we've been talking about yesterday
again and
how incredibly smooth it's one of the
smoothest least
issues elections presidential elections
than i i've seen in in any time that i
could 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
and that's a huge credit to all the
election workers both at the state level
and at the local level as well as our
state partners like pima and office of
homeland security department of homeland
security
who made sure that all those things we
were that people were worried about
whether it was voter intimidation or
issues at the polls
really could not have gone more smoothly
in the middle of a global pandemic
with all the voting reform changes that
we saw from act 77 and act 12.
so that's huge kudos to everybody
involved
also we are exactly where we said we
would be
so we said it was going to take some
time to count the mail ballots
and we are we are approaching 50 of the
mail ballots counted
uh which is great as you know you can go
to our
uh election night returns website and
the supplemental dashboard to get the
greater details on that
but there are still millions of ballots
left to be counted so
the counties are working incredibly hard
you're going to see a lot of updates
in the next couple of hours and
throughout the day
we have been you know a lot there are a
number of counties that
made some major additions in the wee
hours in the morning
so if you checked kind of early on this
morning you may want to check again
because there's already been more
ballots accounted for on our dashboard
again this is a process we've got
you know somewhere i don't know what the
totals are going to end up
at but somewhere between 2.5 and
3 million ballots and as i've said many
times
we had 260 000 ballots cast by mail in
2016 so we
are we will be at 10 times the number of
mail ballots
and the counties are already approaching
50 50
done so i urge everybody to remain
patient
as governor wolf said we are going to
accurately count
every single ballot um
the vote count as i've said many times
is never done
on the day of election night and
the counties are doing this accurately
and then
accurately as quickly as they possibly
can
and again i'll also just remind everyone
military and overseas
ballots are not due until a week after
election day so next tuesday
is the deadline for military and
overseas voters
to cast their ballots and we want to
make sure that not only every civilian
absentee male and valid voter is counted
but also that every man and woman who
are serving our country
that their votes are counted so thank
you
and we are happy to take questions
should i stay for sure i'm sure you want
to talk to kathy any any questions
dennis can you tell us where we stand
right now and what you know of
challenges legal challenges from the
trump administration and how are you
preparing to to deal with those okay
so i think um you know basically what
what you know that's been publicly
reported that's really all
we have at this point so and i can't
talk about active litigation
unfortunately so
i you know you could but as things are
filed of course those will be
publicly accessible you have attorneys
that are going to handle that are you
bringing in somebody from the outside
and who would that be
we have a mix of i mean what we've been
doing all along with all the litigation
that's been flying this year
is we have a mix of in-house and and out
outside council
plus the attorney general is also
representing us in a number of
these things so there's been a great
team i have to say the the attorneys i'm
just going to give a shout out to the
legal team
in the department of state who have been
really put to work this year and they
are amazing
so tim and kat and team thank you
but we also have tremendous teams of
outside counsel who have been involved
in all this
and as the governor said we will we will
make sure that
every vote is counted every eligible
voter has the right to cast their vote
how many counties are handling ballots
that are coming in
tuesday thursday friday how are they
handling that and is each county setting
them aside how is each county doing it
so you can go online to see our guidance
and then last night we also gave sort of
more technical guidance technical
guidance to the counties which
we can forward to you um it basically it
lays out the process
you're talking about the late arriving
ballots so everything's going to be
segregated i'm not sure if you were here
yesterday but
the all those ballots will be segregated
but they will be counted
and the counties have been given
detailed instructions which again you
could find in those guidances
to walk them through how to segregate
those races those ballots
sorry can you talk about the the order
in which those things will be counted i
mean
are they is that a county by county
decision can we expect to see those
numbers being already reflected or is
that something they would get to later
in the process
yeah they'll get to i mean so basically
it's going to depend right there are
some counties that are already done
counting their mail-in ballots received
before 8pm
so those are going to start sooner but
they won't be reflected on the website
they won't be like intermingled in the
website as you see it now
they will be segregated so but it is
going to vary from county to county when
they start because
they're working on the other ones first
will be reflected on the website though
i'm unclear on that
well i think stay tuned on that
yes so on those segregated ballots there
were 500 000
ballots issued that hadn't been cast as
of yesterday israel i'm sorry can you
repeat the question sorry
there were 500 000 mail ballots issued
that
hadn't been cast as of yesterday is
there a way for the state to determine
how many of those 500 000 people chose
to vote
in person instead or do we need to
operate under the assumption that
all 500 000 could come in before friday
so all that will be trackable but i
don't we won't have it today so
basically between
provisional ballots and the poll books
and then of course the mail-in
ballots you know as you all know like
only one
vote can be counted for any voter so
you'll be able to see
all of that but it will take some time
for that data to be
quantified yes sir
last night i think your comment was that
we didn't know how many mail-in ballots
had arrived
yesterday do we know yet how many
ballots arrived yesterday what what is
the number of million files
i i don't have that with me this morning
but check on
check on the dashboard and that will be
updated throughout the day
yeah sorry jan um
representative benninghoff keeps raising
this point about how
ballots that arrived yesterday
that can still be counted may not have a
you know a legible postmark on them and
raising questions about whether or not
they should be counted or not and i was
he said it's because of the prepaid
envelopes that the state provided
i was wondering if you could speak to
that sure
so i'm not sure he may be confusing so
anything that arrived yesterday it
doesn't matter whether it's postmarked
or not anything that arrived yesterday
is a valid vote that's what pennsylvania
law has always been right it needs
so talking about the late arriving
ballots so
the postmark first of all with the way
we did prepaid postage in pennsylvania
is we
went to the counties where they are so
if they wanted it to be
through their business reply mail usps
permit we did it that way if they wanted
to literally have us reimburse them for
stamps
or metered postage we did it however
they want so some of them are not even
and i don't remember how many but we
could get you that information how many
counties are using business reply mail
but those are still postmarked they have
timing marks
they are date stamped they are still
trackable by date
so it's a tiny fraction of
any of those things whether it's
business reply mail or regular mail i
mean we've all had that situation where
you get
a letter and it's not postmarked it's
rare
right same for business reply mail they
do what's called a timing mark so that's
just
it's not accurate they're all stamped
one if it is one of those rare occasions
would it be counted
so under the current under the current
pennsylvania supreme court decision
which is currently the law
yes as long as it's there's no
affirmative evidence
that it was postmarked after november
3rd as long as it's received by november
6 at 5 pm it will be counted
yes it's my understanding that the
state's website is showing
18 counties with zero percent mail-in
ballots counted
is that accurate is do you have any
insight into that
so you know what i would suggest
sometimes counties
are uploading on their own websites and
haven't transmitted the file to the
department of state because you know
they have their own local races
so i urge you if you see any and this is
what we're going to be doing throughout
the day
go to the county website you should
always do that it's a great way to
double check
but we're going to be following up with
all those counties to say
hey you know make sure you get us the
files
some of them you know this year because
we had for the first time
we had a website that was going to
itemize the mail-in ballots from the
in-person ballots from the provisionals
some of the counties when they uploaded
the results
it merged the two types into one
and that was just they formatted it
wrong so we're working through that to
make sure that the
the actual attribution of these ballots
are right
you've noticed that there's a larger
than expected number of counties that
have reported
yeah it doesn't mean that they haven't
counted it may just mean that it's just
not uploaded to the department of state
website yet so i do urge you to check
the county websites and see if that's
that's available on their website last
thing i'm sorry if i could just double
back on something
if i heard you correctly in your
introductory remarks it was between 2.5
and 3 million mail-in ballots is that
and you're and you're roughly 50
if you could speak with as much
specificity as possible
regarding that that would be helpful
well i think yeah the numbers that i
gave yesterday
it was just under 2.6 million as i
recall
but again i'm not sure what has
additionally come in but so
as of as of you know yesterday
at some point it was just under 2.6
million that had been cast
and that's when i think i said it was 83
or something like that so we can get
back to you again go on the website
you'll have that information available
to you i just don't have it in my
fingers tips today
okay yes um can you tell us how many
mail and ballots are upstanding on a
county by county breakdown or is that
awesome
it's on the website yep go to so if you
go to the
regular enr reporting website it also
tells you that you can click
on the supplemental dashboard and and
you click on that it breaks down there's
a tab for mail ballots
that breaks it down by county how many
have been cast
how many have been counted and how many
are remaining there's a tab
for in-person precincts reporting
broken down by counties so i'll tell you
how many precincts are in each county
how many you've been listening to
pennsylvania officials and the governor
there tom wolf give an update on those
million plus votes yet still to be
counted in that state