Election category, Page 109
Allegheny County judge to weigh mail-in ballot issue in Nicole Zicarelli challenge
An Allegheny County judge said that he’ll make a decision on Wednesday whether to count undated mail-in ballots that could impact the race for the 45th state Senate District race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Jim Brewster and Republican challenger Nicole Ziccarelli. Ziccarelli filed a petition against the county Election Board...
Westmoreland County rules staff errors won’t disqualify provisional ballots
Westmoreland County commissioners on Monday agreed to count dozens of provisional ballots cast at more than 30 precincts on Election Day originally classified as defective based on clerical errors made by county staff. Sitting as the county’s Elections Board, commissioners unanimously agreed to count ballots cast by voters who received...
Hand tally of Georgia presidential race continues
ATLANTA — A hand tally of the nearly 5 million votes cast in the presidential race in Georgia appeared to be going smoothly as it entered its fourth day Monday. The hand count stems from a state law that calls for one race to be audited to ensure the new...
Trump campaign drops key request in Pennsylvania lawsuit
HARRISBURG — President Donald Trump’s campaign is withdrawing a central request in its lawsuit seeking to stop the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump to capture the state and help win the White House. Ahead of a Tuesday hearing in the case, Trump’s...
Trump urges judge to preserve suit over Pennsylvania ballots
The Trump campaign urged a judge to preserve its bid to block Pennsylvania from certifying President-elect Joe Biden as the winner, claiming there’s evidence that voters in Democratic-leaning counties were improperly allowed to fix errors with their ballots. In a filing Sunday in federal court, the campaign said a half-dozen...
Poll workers contract virus, but Election Day link unclear
Despite painstaking efforts to keep election sites safe, some poll workers who came in contact with voters on Election Day have tested positive for the coronavirus, including more than two dozen in Missouri and cases in New York, Iowa, Indiana and Virginia. The infections cannot be tied definitively to polling...
Trump seems to acknowledge Biden win, but he won’t concede
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Sunday appeared to acknowledge for the first time that Joe Biden won the White House, but made clear he would not concede and would keep trying to overturn the election result. Trump’s statements came in tweets that included several baseless claims about the Nov....
Polling industry again faces criticism, but most got it right in presidential race
Days before President-elect Joe Biden declared victory, with millions of votes still being counted, pundits as well as regular voters were quick to condemn the polling industry for failing to gauge just how tight the 2020 presidential race initially seemed to be. Democrats hoping to watch a blue wave roll...
Thousands rally behind Trump, insisting he won race he lost; violent clashes break out
WASHINGTON — After several thousand supporters of President Donald Trump protested the election results and marched to the Supreme Court, nighttime clashes with counterdemonstrators led to fistfights, at least one stabbing and more than 20 arrests. Several other cities on Saturday also saw gatherings of Trump supporters unwilling to accept...
Allegheny County Elections Board accepts provisional ballots missing 1 signatureVideo
Hundreds of challenged provisional ballots will be accepted, the Allegheny County Board of Elections decided during a hearing Saturday. Most of the ballots, numbering an estimated 600, had been challenged because the voter had not signed in one of two boxes on the provisional ballot envelope, elections officials said. County...
Trump putting democracy to the test after his loss to Biden
WASHINGTON — Winston Churchill was not known for leaving his thoughts unspoken. One of them was this: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.” President Donald Trump, who has professed admiration for, if not deep...
Infrastructure, jobs are key to coming together under Biden, say Pennsylvania Republicans, unions
After more than a decade of division — Republicans trying to block Barack Obama at every move and Democrats questioning Donald Trump’s legitimacy — President-elect Joe Biden is inheriting a contentious crowd. His best strategy to bring them around a table together, a diverse group of Pennsylvanians say, would be...
Masked workers start presidential hand tally in Georgia
ATLANTA — Masked election workers in teams of two began counting ballots Friday in counties across Georgia, a hand tally of the presidential race that stems from an audit required by a new state law. The law requires that one race be audited to check that new election machines counted...
GOP commissioners reject defective mail-in ballots
Westmoreland County’s Republican commissioners on Friday declined to vote on the status of 343 mail-in ballots that were not properly dated and a separate batch of 375 ballots delivered to the courthouse by the Postal Service nine minutes after the 8 p.m. deadline on Election Day. The move came during...
Allegheny County elections board to hold hearing on provisional ballots
The Allegheny County Board of Elections will convene Saturday for a hearing on hundreds of provisional ballots challenged during review this week. In all, authorized observers from both parties challenged 705 provisional ballots out of the approximately 17,000 provisional ballots returned. Each ballot will receive a hearing, though ballots challenged...
Donald Trump wins battleground state of North Carolina
RALEIGH, N.C. — President Donald Trump has won the presidential battleground state of North Carolina over Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Trump campaigned aggressively in North Carolina with in-person rallies at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, including gatherings in Fayetteville, Winston-Salem and Greenville. Biden had largely kept off the physical...
Tight spot: Trump loss complicates Pence’s political future
WASHINGTON — For Mike Pence, a second term for President Donald Trump would have been a 2024 ticket to Republican frontrunner status. But with Trump’s loss — after Pence spent the last four years as his most loyal soldier and the past year doggedly campaigning on his behalf — the...
Democrats keep winning the popular vote. That worries them.
Democrats won the popular vote in this year’s presidential election yet again, marking seven out of eight straight presidential elections that the party has reached that milestone. And, for some Democrats, that’s worrisome. President-elect Joe Biden has so far won 50.8% of the vote compared to the 47.4% who voted...
GOP state Senate challenger Ziccarelli seeks to have ballots tossed
The Republican candidate for state Senate running against incumbent Sen. Jim Brewster has filed a petition in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court to set aside 2,349 undated mail-in ballots. Unofficial vote totals Friday morning from Allegheny and Westmoreland counties showed Brewster, D-McKeesport, leading by 44 votes. Attorney Matthew Haverstick, who...
Georgia starts hand recount of presidential race
ATLANTA — Georgia’s manual recount began Friday morning as election workers reviewed the first of nearly 5 million ballots to confirm the outcome of the presidential race. The recount started at 9 a.m. and will last until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, resulting in a new, official count in the race where...
Pittsburgh lawyers seek to withdraw from Trump federal suit
The Pittsburgh-based attorneys representing the Trump campaign in a federal lawsuit challenging the election results are seeking to withdraw from the case. Ronald L. Hicks Jr. and Carolyn B. McGee, who work for Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP, filed the motion Thursday. The firm filed a lawsuit in the...
Court blocks small number of ballots in Pennsylvania over ID
HARRISBURG — A Pennsylvania judge sided with President Donald Trump’s campaign Thursday and ordered counties not to count a small number of mail-in or absentee ballots for which the voter didn’t submit valid identification within six days after the Nov. 3 election. The injunction issued by Commonwealth Court Judge Mary...
Top officials: Nov. 3 election most secure in U.S. history
WASHINGTON — A coalition of federal and state officials said Thursday that they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered in last week’s presidential election, rejecting unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by President Donald Trump and many of his supporters. The statement from cybersecurity experts, which trumpeted...
Trump supporters to rally in D.C. against voter fraud; evidence has yet to materialize
Len Young remembers the inspiration he felt a decade ago during a Tea Party rally in Washington, D.C. The Monroeville resident said he hopes to replicate that experience Saturday in the same place, this time in support of President Trump, other state and federal races and “real discovery of fraudulent...
Dems, GOP take different approaches on Georgia Senate blitz
ATLANTA — Jon Ossoff took the stage in Columbus and looked out over a parking lot filled with cars, with supporters blaring their horns in approval as he declared that “change has come to Georgia.” Hours earlier, Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler stepped to a microphone in suburban Atlanta and addressed...
