Live Election Day updates on PA governor, U.S. Senate and more

The AP has called the governor’s race for state attorney general Josh Shapiro. Read the full story here.

The Senate race between Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz and democrat John Fetterman remains close, with supporters awaiting results late into the night.

Supporters are gathered at Oz’s campaign headquarters at the Newtown Athletic Club in Bucks County.

A few hundred supporters are packed into a gymnasium to await the results. Some are wearing outfits incorporating the American flag, or nodding to former president Donald Trump.

Scott Van Blarcom is 23. He says he’s thrilled to be at an event with other Republicans.

“I thought it was a good opportunity to experience an election, because 2020 was obviously much different with Covid going on.”

Van Blarcom says crime is a top issue for him. Others supporters say they’re backing Oz because they’re hopeful he’ll reduce inflation, lower taxes and prevent illegal immigration.

Samantha Twining says she came as part of the United Spinal Association’s Greater Philadelphia chapter. She was injured in a car accident 15 years ago and has been using a wheelchair since.

The 36-year-old Delaware County resident says she would like to see a doctor in the state legislature.

“Really because of the knowledge of what spinal cord injuries really are. Maybe if we can come to a common conversation, discuss what’s missing.”

Many medical professionals have called into question the health advice that Oz gave on his daytime television show.

Glenn Thompson has been re-elected to the U.S. House seat he’s held since 2009. At 11:30 p.m. with 85% of votes counted, Thompson had about 70% of the vote to Democrat Michael Molesevich’s 30%.

The 15th district is newly redrawn after redistricting and includes all or part of 18 counties in northcentral Pennsylvania and most of the WPSU listening area, including all of Centre, Clearfield, Clinton, Cameron, Elk, McKean, Warren and Forest counties.

A few hundred supporters have gathered at the Penn Harris Hotel ballroom in Camp Hill in the hopes of celebrating a victory for their candidate, Republican state senator and governor candidate Doug Mastriano.

The room is upbeat, with music, photo ops, and food and drink.

But not everyone is optimistic. One supporter, Bob Pyle of Snyder County, said victory here tonight is doubtful.

Mastriano is set to take the stage around 9:30. A prayer service and other entertainment is scheduled before that.

WPSU’s Carolyn Donaldson has been in Elk County today. She spoke with voters in St. Marys about why they were voting today. She talked with Bill, a poll worker for the Democrats named Mary and Don.

In Allegheny County, while the election is proceeding smoothly by all accounts, the county's elections court has issued a handful of orders regarding concerns at area polling places.

"One court order named several individuals purportedly with an entity called "The Commission Security." The order said they were "purporting to be poll security" and required them to "cease and desist from traveling to or entering any polling place in Allegheny County and/or interfering with the operations and functioning of any polling place.

"County officials say election workers received a call about individuals claiming to have a contract to provide security and asking voters for information. "Commission" members had apparently departed the scene by the time deputies arrived leaving them with no one to serve the order on. But they advised poll workers in Wilkinsburg to keep an eye out for the group.

The court also ordered a man to stop filming and taking photographs inside a polling location earlier today after election workers observed him doing do. Lawyers from the county cited state statutes and case law establishing that videotaping inside a polling place may be considered voter intimidation.

“A constable told him not to do that but he would not accept that so we ended up sending a sheriff,” said county attorney Dennis Biondo said. The man voluntarily left the polling place, which was not immediately identified, after he was served with the order.

Also today, the court issued a cease-and-desist order barring an Upper St. Clair Republican Committee officer from entering any polling place in Allegheny County. The court issued the order in response to reports that the party official instructed poll workers to orally announce who people were voting for as they cast their ballots.

A judge in Pennsylvania did not order local officials to count mail ballots received six days after Election Day, contrary to viral misinformation on Twitter claiming so.

No such order adjusting the ballot deadline from Nov. 8 to Nov. 14 has been issued by a judge in Pennsylvania, nor has such a case been brought. The deadline remains 8 p.m. today, for all mail-in and in-person ballots.

A post making the claim Tuesday came from a user named Kyle Becker, whose profile says he is a journalist who has worked for Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News.

Voters in Luzerne County have until 10 p.m. to cast their ballots.

Acting Director of Elections Beth McBride requested the extension after polling places started to run out of the type of paper the county uses to print and count ballots from its electronic voting machines.

Typically, polls close at 8 p.m.

The order issued by Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas Judge Lesa Gelb states that voters in Luzerne County through "no fault of their own, were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote."

Luzerne County Bureau of Elections and Luzerne County Board of Elections requested the extension, according to the order.

Around 40 polling places in Luzerne County ran out by this afternoon, but calls for more paper started coming in by 8:30 a.m., McBride said. Polls opened in Pennsylvania at 7 a.m.

"We don't have the exact scale of the problem. Right now, we're assuming that every single polling place was effected," McBride said. "We are doing the best we can and getting paper out to these polling places ... so that they're able to function."

Those who filled out a provisional or emergency ballot do not need to return to their polling place, but McBride encouraged any voters who were turned away to take advantage of the extension.

A spokesperson for incumbent Democratic Congressman Matt Cartwright said that the congressman fully supports the extension to allow for maximum voter participation.

Republican Jim Bognet learned of the extension in Luzerne County shortly after the order was issued.

"We need to get our elections done right here in Luzerne County," he said. "We need to get our elections cleaned up."

Jeff Chiu

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AP

Election legal challenges were playing out Tuesday as voters cast ballots across the country in the midterm elections. And more bruising court fights are expected in the coming days that could draw out how long it takes for votes to be counted in some races.

More than 100 lawsuits were filed before Tuesday's elections, targeting rules for things like mail-in voting, voting machines and access for partisan poll watchers.

And observers are bracing for a deluge of challenges after polls close as some Republican candidates have already said they will not accept a loss or have planted doubt on the election process despite no evidence of fraud.

The avalanche of election cases follows Republican Donald Trump's failed effort to get courts to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. Trump and his Republican allies brought roughly 60 lawsuits challenging the election that were roundly rejected by judges appointed to the bench by presidents of both political parties.

Here's a look at at the legal challenges playing out in some states:

PENNSYLVANIA

Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman’s campaign went to court late Monday in a bid to have mail-in ballots that lack accurate handwritten dates on the exterior envelopes counted. Fetterman's legal action followed a state Supreme Court ruling that said the ballots could not be counted and another over the weekend clarifying what constituted an incorrect date.

Fetterman's campaign — in partnership with national congressional and senatorial Democratic campaign organizations and two voters — sued county boards of election across the state, arguing that throwing out ballots that lack proper envelope dates would violate a provision in the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act that says people can’t be kept from voting based on what the lawsuit calls “needless technical requirements.”

In Philadelphia, voters who had missing or incorrect dates on their mail-in ballots were being allowed to file replacement ballots at City Hall or vote provisionally at their regular precincts Tuesday.

It’s unclear how many ballots would be affected by the decision across the state, but thousands were flagged by election officials in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh. The number of mail-in ballots is large enough that they might matter in a close race, such as the U.S. Senate contest between Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz.

The Philadelphia City Commissioners also voted in an emergency meeting early Tuesday to reinstate a process to reconcile the poll books while the count is happening, rather than waiting until after the count. The procedure has been used to weed out possible double votes in the past, but has not found any issues during the past three elections and is slower than reconciling after the count. The final ballots are likely to be counted Friday.

The vote came after a judge issued an order denying Republicans’ request for an injunction that would have forced the city to reinstate the process. But the judge’s opinion, which had admonished the city’s decision to remove the process, raised concerns for commissioners.

TEXAS

A federal judge in Texas has barred election volunteers and workers at a polling location in a predominantly Black neighborhood from asking voters to publicly recite their address before allowing them to cast a ballot in the midterm elections.

The Monday night order came after the Beaumont chapter of the NAACP and voter Jessica Daye sued, alleging that Black voters were harassed and intimidated during early voting at the John Paul Davis Community Center polling location, where 90% of voters are Black.

U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale also barred workers and volunteers from shadowing voters as they cast ballots.

The complaint also alleged that poll workers, who are partisans brought on by political parties, helped white voters insert or scan ballots into voting machines but not Black voters, and the judge's order barred that activity as well.

Beaumont is a city of about 112,000 people near the Louisiana border that’s about 80 miles (125 kilometers) east of Houston. In 2020, Jefferson County — where Beaumont is the county seat — voters narrowly backed Donald Trump, with 50.2% favoring the former president and 48.6% backing Joe Biden.

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Associated Press reporter Claudia Lauer contributed to this report.

A last-minute change to Philadelphia’s vote-counting plan means that Pennsylvania’s largest, most heavily Democratic county will take longer than it originally anticipated to finish tabulating ballots.

Philadelphia officials had initially projected that they would be mostly finished counting ballots by Wednesday morning. It was an important prediction. The incorrect idea that a slow vote count means something nefarious is going on is common in right-wing political circles and is frequently used to cast doubt on election results in places like Philly.

But now, some tens of thousands of mail ballots still left to count on Tuesday night will need to be counted more slowly through the week, according to The Inquirer.

That’s not a sign that anything is wrong with the count — just that election workers are conducting an extra, time-consuming check for double votes.

That check is known as poll book reconciliation — a process by which poll workers scan poll book pages into the state’s voter registry to check in-person votes against mail votes. All counties do this eventually, but for the past few years, Philadelphia has been one of the only counties to conduct the check during its initial vote count.

This allowed it to catch double votes that may have slipped through the initial checks that all polling places are required to conduct to make sure nobody votes twice.

Philadelphia’s commissioners had decided to forego that process this year for several reasons. It’s time-consuming, there were no double votes caught by the process in the last three elections, other counties don’t do it, and it involves pausing the count, which commissioners worried could violate a new election law that requires counties to tabulate ballots continuously.

But a conservative group called RITE — Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections — sued the commissioners, arguing poll book reconciliation is necessary. The case went to Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, where a judge ruled that it was too close to the election for the commissioners to change their process, but that they were wrong to get rid of poll book reconciliation. RITE appealed the case to Commonwealth Court.

The morning of Election Day, commissioners backtracked, saying they were reinstating poll book reconciliation because, as GOP City Commissioner Seth Bluestein said, “while we technically won the court case, the decision was written in such a way that we have no choice but to reinstate the process.”

Bluestein added that he wants to “make it very clear” that “when there are conversations that occur later this evening about whether or not Philadelphia has counted all of their ballots, that the reason that some of the ballots will not be counted is that Republican attorneys targeted Philadelphia, and only Philadelphia, and tried to force us to do a procedure that no other county does.”

Shortly after the commissioners announced their decision, RITE issued a statement apparently responding to Bluestein, saying that “if there are delays, only the Commissioners are to blame.”

Matt Rourke

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AP

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Some of Pennsylvania's largest counties scrambled Monday to help voters fix mail-in ballots that have fatal flaws such as incorrect dates or missing signatures on the envelopes used to send them in, bringing about confusion and legal challenges in the battleground state on the eve of the election.

Elections officials in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, announced measures they were taking in response to state Supreme Court rulings in recent days that said mail-in ballots may not be counted if they lack accurate handwritten dates on the exterior envelopes.

Ahead of Tuesday's midterms, more than a million mail-in and absentee ballots have already been returned in Pennsylvania, with Democrats far more likely than Republicans to vote by mail. The numbers are large enough that they might matter in a close race, such as the contest between Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz that could determine majority control of the U.S. Senate.

The Department of State said it was unclear just how many ballots are at issue across the state. The agency over the weekend asked counties to provide the numbers, broken down by political party. Officials said some counties were not letting voters fix their mistakes.

Lines formed at City Hall in downtown Philadelphia on Monday and over the weekend with voters waiting to correct their ballots. Some people on social media said the office did not get to everyone Monday.

The Pennsylvania litigation was filed by Republican groups and is among legal efforts by both political parties in multiple states to have courts sort out disputes over voting rules and procedures ahead of the midterm election.

A new federal lawsuit over the envelope dates was filed Monday in Pittsburgh federal court by the national congressional and senatorial Democratic campaign organizations, two Democratic voters and Fetterman's U.S. Senate campaign. They sued county boards of election across the state, arguing that throwing out ballots that lack proper envelope dates would violate a provision in the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act that says people can't be kept from voting based on what the lawsuit calls “needless technical requirements.”

A separate federal lawsuit filed Friday makes a similar argument.

In Wisconsin, the Republican chair of the state Assembly’s elections committee, along with a veterans group and other voters, filed a lawsuit Friday seeking a court order requiring the sequestering of military absentee ballots in the battleground state. The lawsuit seeks a temporary injunction requiring elections officials in Wisconsin to set aside military ballots so their authenticity can be verified.

A judge Monday refused that order.

Also on Monday, in Arizona, a judge blocked Cochise County's plan to conduct a Republican effort to count all ballots by hand. The lawsuit aimed to stop the county board of supervisors from expanding what is normally a small hand tally used to verify machines’ accuracy to include all early ballots and all Election Day ballots as well.

A challenge against voting by absentee ballot in Detroit was also thrown out Monday after a judge ruled that a Republican candidate for secretary of state “failed dramatically” to produce any evidence of violations in the majority-Black city.

Pennsylvania's acting secretary of state, Leigh Chapman, on Monday urged mail-in voters who think they may have made technical errors to contact their county elections offices. If the county won't let them fix the problem, they should go to their local polling place on Tuesday and request a provisional ballot, she said.

In Allentown, Lehigh County officials reached out to all the voters they could locate whose ballots have problems, election director Tim Benyo said Monday. He said there are a few hundred ballots at issue.

“People have been very interested in curing their ballots,” Benyo said. “We’ve been busy.”

Allegheny County elections officials posted online the names and birth years of voters who have sent in ballots in envelopes that either lack any date or are dated outside the permissible range of Sept. 19-Nov. 8 for mail-in ballots and Aug. 30-Nov. 8 for absentee ballots. Those voters can fix their ballots in person at the elections office Monday or Tuesday, or vote provisionally at their regular polling places.

Allegheny reported that, as of Sunday, more than 600 incorrectly and nearly 400 undated ballots had arrived to be counted. Philadelphia said it has received about 2,000 undated ballots and several hundred more that appear to have been incorrectly dated.

Philadelphia Deputy Commissioner Nick Custodio said the court decision last week and the tide of ballots rolling in ahead of Election Day has made it difficult to issue direct notifications.

“So far we have only been able to put out a list on our website, but we are exploring whatever other options are available given the short time-period,” Custodio said.

Dozens of voters seeking to fix their ballots showed up at City Hall over the weekend, and Custodio said more visited city offices Monday. Volunteers from several groups are contacting those voters to see if they need help getting to the elections office.

A judge in Monroe County, a swing region in eastern Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, on Monday denied a Republican request to stop efforts by county election officials to notify voters about defective absentee and mail-in ballots and give them a chance to fix them.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that mail-in votes do not count if they are “contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes,” then supplemented that with a follow-up order on Saturday that specified the allowable date range for mail-in and absentee ballots.

Ballots without properly dated envelopes have been the topic of litigation since mail-in voting was greatly expanded in Pennsylvania under a state law passed in 2019.

Mail-in ballots must be received by 8 p.m. Tuesday, so at this point officials are urging people who have not done so to deliver them to elections offices or drop boxes by hand.

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This story has been corrected to say mail-in ballots must be received by 8 p.m., not 8 a.m.
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AP reporters Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, Bob Christie in Phoenix and Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed to this story.

Dave's Redistricting

If you live in the eastern part of the State College area or in northern Centre County, you likely live in the new 82nd state house district. It was created by redistricting and is a rare district that is considered competitive. That means it's important you know who's running!

WPSU did interviews with the two candidates. They're only about seven minutes each, so you can probably listen to both interviews in the time it takes you to get your shoes and coat on and drive to the polls. Here are the interviews:
Republican Justin Behrens
Democrat Paul Takac

Across Pennsylvania, more than 1.4 million people requested to vote by mail. As of Nov. 7, 1.16 million absentee and mail ballots had been returned, according to Department of State data.

Before Election Day, some of the state’s largest counties said it would likely take until Wednesday to finish counting absentee and mail ballots.

In Lancaster County, where more than 41,000 mail and absentee ballots were received as of Monday, officials expect to finish the count by midnight.

Elections director Christa Miller said roughly 25% of those ballots had been opened. As of 10 a.m., approximately 300 voters had dropped off mail ballots Tuesday at the election office as they may do until 8 p.m.

Per an order from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the county is not counting but is setting aside undated and incorrectly dated ballots. Miller did not have an estimate of how many of those ballots the county had received.

The candidates for governor and Senate have all voted — presumably for themselves. Have you voted yet? Polls are open in Pennsylvania until 8 p.m.

Candidates for Senate:

Candidates for governor:

The Department of Justice said Tuesday they’re monitoring five Pennsylvania counties to make sure they’re following federal voting rights laws on Election Day. This includes Centre, Berks, Lehigh, Luzerne, and Philadelphia Counties.

The DOJ has sent personnel from the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to minimize illegal disruptions and violence at polling places. The effort is part of a plan released by the department last month to ensure that elections are “secure and free from foreign malign influence and interference.”

The department also urges voters to contact local election officials if they witness voter intimidation that could violate election code.

You can report non-violent complaints to the department by visiting civilrights.justice.gov. Any violence should be reported to local police.

They close at 8 p.m.

If you don't know who to vote for yet, check out WPSU's Vote website. You can:
🗳️ Find out which candidates will be on your ballot.
🗳️ Read their answers to the WPSU Issues Questionnaire.
🗳️ Find your polling place.
🗳️ Read recent WPSU stories about the races.
🗳️ Find out what to do if you forgot to mail in your mail-in ballot! They have to be RECEIVED by 8 p.m. today. (OK, we'll tell you here: Ballot drop boxes are NOT the answer. Centre County is the only one in the WPSU listening area with satellite ballot drop boxes and they're now closed. So you can either take it to your county board of elections office before 8 p.m. or hand it in at your polling place and vote in person.)