Associated Press: Pennsylvania becomes a battleground over election security

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — For anxiety over voting and ballot counting in this year’s presidential election, it’s hard to top Pennsylvania.

Election officials in Philadelphia, home to one-fifth of the state’s Democratic voters, have been sued by President Donald Trump’s campaign, blasted by the president as overseeing a place “where bad things happen” and forced to explain security measures after a theft from a warehouse full of election equipment.

Add to that an investigation into military ballots that were mistakenly discarded in one swing county, partisan sniping in the state Capitol over the processing of what is expected to be an avalanche of mailed-in ballots and an 11th hour attempt by Republican lawmakers to create an election integrity commission.

One of the most hotly contested presidential battleground states is trying to conduct a pandemic election in a hyper-partisan environment where every move related to the voting process faces unrelenting scrutiny from both sides. State and local election officials say they are doing all they can to make sure Pennsylvania doesn’t end up like Florida two decades ago, when the last drawn-out presidential tally ended before the U.S. Supreme Court. …

Trump won Pennsylvania narrowly in 2016 — by less than 1 percentage point — to become the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the state since 1988. Tied for the fifth-most electoral votes, it is of the utmost value to both Trump and Biden. Polls show a tight race in Pennsylvania, with Biden holding a single-digit lead, often within the margin of error.

Republicans have signaled that the battle for who wins Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes could extend past Election Day amid challenges to individual ballots.

“We are seeing the kind of incidents that are likely to happen in every election be blown up to mean there is something fundamentally wrong with Pennsylvania election administration and we can’t trust the Department of State or the counties to give us an accurate count,” said Suzanne Almeida with Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan organization that advocates to expand access to voting. “There are any number of reasons why that’s not true.”