Fox News contributor Bill McGurn suggested on Wednesday that Pennsylvania throw out hundreds of thousands of legal votes, saying that “we should do everything to try to prevent” the state from counting votes after November 3, even though election results are never completely tallied by midnight on Election Day.
Republicans have filed lawsuits to block the counting of votes in the state and to “throw out mail ballots containing errors that were corrected by voters.” This would disenfranchise voters and discount their legal votes in a year when more votes were cast with mail-in ballots. In fact, “over 2.5 million mail-in ballots had been received” in Pennsylvania “as of Tuesday morning,” which accounted for “about 40 percent of the total ballots cast in 2016.” Many of those votes remain to be counted, and more than 1.6 million of those mail-in votes came from Democrats.
Election officials have warned for months that “the expected influx of mail-in votes this year could mean a longer wait before the winner of the presidency was known,” and some counties in Pennsylvania were not able to start counting absentee ballots until November 4. Republicans have worked in several states to invalidate these votes, which often favor Democrats. In fact, Republicans have been working in several states to invalidate these votes, which often favor Democrats “since the ballots usually tend to come from more urban jurisdictions.”