Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

As Pennsylvania gets closer to finishing up its tally of its mail ballots — and it’s clear that they will expand Biden’s lead to some extent — we’ve seen lots of questions circulating about provisional ballots. There are a little over 100,000 provisional ballots statewide, according to Pennsylvania officials, so what are these ballots and how could they change the race? First of all, provisional ballots came about because of the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which was passed after the difficulties in the 2000 election. Basically, if there’s uncertainty about a voter’s eligibility to vote for some reason — perhaps because of conflicting registration data or a lack of proper identification — a person can cast a provisional ballot instead of a regular one. However, this year the huge uptick in mail voting added a new wrinkle to the provisional ballot process. In Pennsylvania, a voter who initially requested a mail ballot may decide to vote in person instead. If so, they must either (i) bring their mail ballot with them to surrender back to elections officials or (ii) cast a provisional ballot. This helps to ensure that they can’t vote twice, as officials will check to see if anyone who cast a provisional ballot also mailed one in. What sort of voter winds up in this category? Traditionally, provisional ballots have leaned Democratic because the types of voters who have issues with voter eligibility tend to be from groups that are more likely to vote Democratic, such as voters of color or younger people. With the mail ballot component added in, it’s less clear how this group might break down. On the one hand, the universe of people who initially requested mail ballots in Pennsylvania is very Democratic; on the other hand, people who voted in person are very Republican. So maybe you’d expect people who initially requested a mail ballot but then decided to vote in person to be somewhere in between. We do have some data to look at, however. First item: We can look at how many people requested mail ballots but didn’t return them, since these are the people who might have gone to vote in person instead. There were about 250,000 registered Democrats who requested but didn’t return mail ballots, along with 167,000 Republicans, and 63,000 voters who were registered with no party or with minor parties. That’s a fairly strong hint that the universe of people who cast provisional ballots in this fashion leans Democratic — in which case, the ballots are unlikely to help Trump. There are also 10 counties that have counted their provisional ballots so far. On the surface, they would seem to contain some good news for Trump: He’s winning these provisionals by almost a 3:1 ratio over Biden! Here’s the catch: These are really red counties, and he’s also winning non-provisional ballots there by about a 3:1 margin:

How Pennsylvania’s provisional ballots look so far

		Trump share of 2-party vote
County	Provisionals as Share of Counted Ballots	Provisional ballots	All ballots
Bradford	1.3%	77	73
Cambria	0.7	73	69
Cameron	1.2	71	74
Huntingdon	0.5	76	76
Jefferson	1.2	82	80
Juniata	0.8	81	81
Lebanon	0.1	69	66
Montour	0.8	70	61
Sullivan	0.8	69	74
Tioga	1.4	77	76
Average	0.9	75	73

As you can see, there’s a strong correlation between the share of the provisional vote that Trump receives in each county and his share of the vote overall. In fact, in many counties, it’s almost exactly the same percentage. In Huntingdon County, for instance, Trump has gotten 76 percent of the vote on provisional ballots (excluding votes cast for minor-party candidates), and the same 76 percent in votes cast in that county overall. That comports well with our theory that the party breakdown of provisional ballots in Pennsylvania is effectively somewhere in between mail votes and in-person votes. On average in these 10 counties, Trump has gotten 75 percent of the provisional vote, as compared with 73 percent of the non-provisional vote. So if there’s any particular advantage for Trump here, it’s been pretty darn small and not statistically significant. There’s another hint, however, that these ballots may cost Trump in the end. That’s in the column that shows the percentage of a county’s overall returns that consists of provisional ballots. It’s 0.9 percent on average in these red counties. That compares with about 1.5 percent of all ballots statewide, if we go with the state’s estimate of 100,000 provisional ballots across Pennsylvania. And in Philadelphia County, there are 19,000 provisional ballots, which works out to about 2.5 percent of all ballots there. In other words, there are considerably more of these ballots in bluer counties — Philadelphia in particular — which makes it unlikely that they will help Trump on balance. The one caveat is that we don’t have data on provisionals from any blue or purple counties yet. We don’t think there’s any particular reason to expect the provisional ballots in those counties to be red, but the analysis will be more robust once those counties start to report their counts. It’s worth emphasizing, though, that Trump would have to do massively, massively well with the provisional ballots to overcome his deficit in the state. Once the remaining mail ballots are counted, Biden’s lead could expand to somewhere between, say, 50,000 and 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania. If there are 100,000 provisionals and Trump needed to claw back 50,000 votes — which is probably an optimistic case for him — that means he’d need to win them by 50 points (that is, 75-25), even though they’re mostly in blue counties. That is exceptionally unlikely.

Quick turnaround from the Supreme Court, which has just granted the Pennsylvania GOP’s request to instruct county election boards to segregate mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day. This order was probably made easier by the fact that, as Amelia noted earlier, the Pennsylvania secretary of state had already directed counties to do this. In his order, Justice Samuel Alito did not order counties to stop counting these ballots, which was also part of the initial request this afternoon. Pennsylvania’s secretary of state has said that there aren’t enough of these late-arriving ballots to affect the final outcome of the presidential race in Pennsylvania.

And, from Arizona political observer extraordinaire Garrett Archer, here is a third estimate of the remaining votes: 243,000.