Since 1787. It is still the promise of democracy and i intend here in pennsylvania to make sure we keep that promise. Said, counties continue to report results and, again, the results are coming in more slowly than they have in the past. Butave to be patient confident that these votes will be counted, they will be counted accurately and they will be counted fully. The delay we are seeing is a sign the system is working. This is a new system that went into effect last year and there millions of mailin ballots that are being counted and that takes longer than the way we used to do it with in person voting. We may not know the results even today but the most important thing is that we have accurate results again, even if that takes longer than we are used to. Make no mistake, our democracy is being tested in this election. This is a stress test to the ideals upon which this country was founded and the basic rule of one person, one vote, that still carries, it has to carry here. Our democracy is withstood challenges before and for over 200 years, we have upheld and strengthened our commitment to basic fairness and due process. I have full faith that we will similarly meet this moment and i will do everything within my power to ensure that the results are fair and that every vote is counted. Pennsylvania will have a fair willion and that election be free of outside influences. I will vigorously, and we will all vigorously defend against any attempt to attack that vote in pennsylvania. Pennsylvanian, every pennsylvanian can have confidence in the outcome of this election do to the diligence, the county Election Officials and the hardworking secretary and her folks at the Pennsylvania Department of state. Thank you again to all the pennsylvanians who voted. Rest assured, your vote will be counted if it hasnt already been. Your vote will make a difference in this election. This is the way we elect our officials, this is the way we hire the people who are public give to, the promise we a pennsylvanians, all americans that their vote counts and i intend to keep that promise here in pennsylvania. I will turn this over to the secretary of state. Good morning. I want to echo some of what Governor Wolf said about once again thanking all of the tens and thousands if not hundreds of thousands of election workers that were and are still involved in the process of enabling this great democracy in pennsylvania and across the nation. The work they have done and continue to do is just tremendous. We have been talking at the department of state, our Operations Center were talking at 4 30 a. M. And we went home to take a shower and were back within a couple of hours. Its been working around the clock as are many of the counties and weve been talking about yesterday and how incredibly smooth, its one of the smoothest, least issues elections, president ial elections i have seen in any time i can possibly remember. I have been in and around elections a long time. As a Voting Rights laurier lawyer and a poll worker and this is incredibly smooth and thats a huge credit to all the election workers at the state level and the local level as well as our stay partners like pema and the department of Homeland Security who have made sure that all of those things that people were worried about, whether it was voter intimidation or issues at the polls really could not have gone more smoothly in the middle of a Global Pandemic with all of the voting reform changes we saw. Here is q does to everybody involved. Dish here is kudos to everyone involved. We are exactly where we said it would be. We said it would take time to count the mailin ballots and we are approaching 50 of the mailin ballots counted which is great. You can go to our Election Night returns website and the supplemental dashboard to get to getails on that greater details on that but there are still millions of ballots left to be counted so the counties are working incredibly hard and you will see a lot of updates in the next couple of hours and throughout the day. There are a number of counties that made some major additions in the wee hours of the morning. Morninged early on this and you may want to check again because there has already been more ballots accounted for. Again, this. Is a process i dont know what the totals will and up as but somewhere between 2. 5 and 3 million ballots. Hadve said many times, we 260,000 ballots sent in by mail in 20 so we will be at 10 times the number of mailin ballots on the counties are already approaching 50 done. I urge everybody to remain patient as Governor Wolf said. We will accurately count every single ballot. Done on count is never the day of Election Night and the counties are doing this accurately and as quickly as they possibly can. I will also just remind everyone that military overseas ballots are not due until a week after election day so next tuesday is the deadline for military and overseas voters to cast their ballots. We want to make sure that not only every civilian absentee mailin ballot vote is counted also that every man and woman serving our country, that their votes are counted. Thank you and we are happy to take questions. Can you tell us where we stand right now and what you know of legal challenges from the Trump Administration and how are you preparing to deal with those . Been you know thats publicly reported is what we know and i cant talk about active litigation, unfortunately. As things are filed, those will be publicly accessible. Do you have attorneys to handle that or are you bringing people in from the outside . What weve been doing all along with the litigation this years we have a mix of inhouse and outside counsel. Plus the attorney general is also representing us in a number of things. , the has been a great team attorneys, i will give a shout out to the legal team in the department of state who have been really put to work this tim and they are amazing so and cat and team, thank you but we also have tremendous teams of outside councils that are involved in this and as the governor said, we will make sure that every vote is counted, every eligible voter has the right to cast their vote. Counties are handling ballots that are coming in tuesday, thursday, friday . How is each county doing it . You can go online to see our guidance and last night, we gave more technical guidance to the counties which we can forward to you. It lays out the process. You are talking about the late arriving ballot so everything will be segregated. The ballots will be segregated but they will be counted and the counties have been given detailed instructions which you can find in the guidances to walk them through how to segregate those ballots. Ordern you talk about the in which those things will be counted, is that a county by county decision . Can we expect those numbers already reflected or is that something later in the process . Alreadycounties have done counting their mailin ballots so they will start sooner. They wont be reflected on the website. They wont be intermingled on the website as you see it now, it will be segregated but it will vary from county to county when they start because they are working on the other ones first. What will be reflected on the website . Stay tuned on that. On those segregated ballots, there were 500,000 ballots issued that hadnt then cast that had been cast ther were 500,00 mailin ballots issued0 that habit been cast as of yesterday. Is there a way for us for the state to determine how many of those people chose to vote in person instead or do we need to operate under the assumption that all 500,000 could come in before friday . All that will be trackable but we wont have it today. Between provisional ballots p and theoll books and the mailin onlyts, as you all know, one vote can be counted for any voter. You will be able to see all of that but it will take some time for that data to be quantified. Comment wast, your you didnt know how many mailin ballots had arrived yesterday. Do we yet know how many arrived yesterday . I dont have that with me this morning but check on the dashboard and that will be updated throughout the day. The point of ballots that arrived yesterday can still be counted may not have a legible postmark on them and raises questions about whether or not they should be counted or not. They say its because of the prepaid envelopes that were provided by the state. Arriveding that yesterday doesnt matter whether its postmarked or not. Anything that arrived yesterday was is a valid vote. Talking about the late arriving the way first of all, we do prepaid postage in pennsylvania is we went to the counties where they were. If they wanted it to be through Business Reply mail, usps, we did it that way. If they wanted to be reimbursed, we did whatever they want. I do not remember how many but we could get you that information. How many counties are using Business Reply mail. Those are still postmarked. They are date stamped and they are still trackable by date. Of any ofny fraction those things whether it is Business Reply mail or regular mail. We all have a situation where you get a letter and it is not postmarked. It is rare. Business reply mail does a timing mark, so it is not accurate. They are all stamped. If it is a rare occasion, would be counted . Under the Current Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision which is the law as long as there is no affirmative evidence it was postmarked after november 3 and received by november 6 at 6 00 p. M. It will be counted. We show 18 counties with 0 mailin ballots counted. Is that accurate . Do you have any insight . Counties are uploading on their own websites and have not transmitted the file. They had their own local races. If you see and this is what we are doing throughout the day go to the county website. You should always do that. It is a great way to double check. We will followup with those counties to say, hey, make sure you get us the files. This year because we had, for the first time, a website that was going to itemize the ballots some counties when they uploaded it merged them into one. They formatted it wrong. We are working through that to make sure the actual ballots are right. There is a larger unexpected number of counties that have yeah. It does not mean they havent counted, it just might not be uploaded. I urge you to check the county website. Last thing, if i could double back . If i heard you correctly, between 2. 5 million and 3 million mailin ballots in your 50 . If you could speak with as much specificity as possible, that would be helpful. Yeah. The numbers i gave yesterday was just under to put 6 million as i recall. Sure what hast additionally come in. It was just under 2. 6 million and that was when it was 83 . Go on the website and you will have that available to you. I just do not have it at my figure tips. Yes. Can you tell us how money many mailin ballots are in county by county website . Go on the website. It also tells you you can click on the supplemental dashboard. You click on that and it breaks down there is it have for mailin ballots that breaks it down by county. How many have been cast, counted, and how many remaining. Tab for how many precincts are in each county and how many are fully reported. There is a tab for provisional ballots, but you will not see those yet. Thank you. I want to thank lancaster county. What theyre saying is if they count anything you are authorizing them to segregate, they will not go back if there is a ruling and remove those. What is your response . It is not accurate. We sent in email to the counties yesterday. Votinge to all of the system vendors. Ands absolutely feasible not even challenging. There are different ways to do it. You can use different machines, different memory sticks, you can absolutely segregate them. That is not good to be a problem. We have sent this email to the counties giving them instruction, advising them to talk directly to Voting System vendors. What if they do not comply . We will cross that bridge when we get there. I expect them all to comply. Thank you. Announcer continuing our live coverage of campaign 2020 as we look at a live picture of the white house. We are awaiting the start of a News Conference with democratic president ial candidate joe biden set started 1 45. Obviously running late, but we will have that when it gets underway. Votes in the president ial election still being counted and still possible for the race to go either way. However, there are encouraging signs for joe biden in the state that have not been called. He has already taken the lead in michigan and wisconsin and expected to take the lead in pennsylvania as more mailin ballots are counted. Those three states would be enough for biden to top the 270 electoral votes needed even if he loses every other state. Again, a live picture outside the white house. A number of protesters have gathered throughout the day and we have been showing that to you as we wait for joe bidens News Conference to start in a couple of minutes. House minority leader Kevin Mccarthy held his own News Conference where he reacted to the election. He talked about the republican gains made in the house and told reporters he agreed with the president that every legal vote should be counted. [video clip]