Take Pennsylvania, which Trump currently leads by over 14 percentage points. Over 3 million registered voters requested mail-in ballots in the state, which offered the option for the first time this year in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. State law prohibited any of those to be counted before 7 am Thursday, which means a full counting could take days if not weeks. As of 6:30pm ET on Tuesday, Philadelphia County had counted only 75,000 of its 350,000 mail votes, with more expected to arrive through the Friday deadline. Around 550,000 votes there remain to be counted overall. And that’s just Philadelphia. At least two million ballots remain uncounted across the entire state.
Or Georgia, where an early Trump lead seems likely to erode as ballots from Democratic strongholds like Fulton County and DeKalb County get tabulated over the next two days. Or Michigan and Wisconsin, pivotal states that haven't reported enough results to provide useful information either way. (In a small irony, Trump declared those states safely in hand despite some razor-thin margins, while lamenting that Arizona, where he trails by over 130,000 votes at the time of publication, remains within his reach if only they would count more votes.)
And while they may not be as tightly contested as Pennsylvania and Georgia, over a dozen states consider mail ballots valid as long as they're postmarked by November 3 and arrive anywhere from a few days to over two weeks after, depending on where you live. It doesn’t help matters that the United States Postal Service can’t account for 300,000 mail ballots; the donald trump anything
