I remember CNN saying that Philadelphia was stopping the count until 5am the next morning.
But like an hour later, someone on the 538 blog made a post saying something to the effect of "I'm not sure where this rumor that philly stopped counting came from, but it's not true. You can see for yourself - they're doing it on livestream" and gave a link to the stream.
Now what I think actually happened is that they said they would stop UPDATING until 5am and CNN and others interpreted that as counting.
The bottom line, though.. whether they stopped counting or updating, the decision was made to stop counting and reporting by precinct and instead lump all the absentee ballots for the entire county together at some point. And that call just so happened to be made in a blue county in every swing state. I really can't think of any legitimate reasons to do that.
My state did it the best way, IMO, and reported precinct by precinct and the report included absentee votes, early votes and in-person election day votes all at once. Once a precinct reported, that was it. There was no pool of remaining ballots of some unknown size. Now I get that PA had a law preventing the opening of absentees before election day, and that would have made it harder in that they would have had to delay the in person reporting, but that's absolutely what they should have done.
But the thing is, to my knowledge, that did not apply in Georgia, Wisconsin, or Michigan. There is no reason they needed to be counting such a significant number of absentee ballots in the middle of the night.
In hindsight, we should have seen this coming and pressed for a national standard of counting and reporting absentee ballots alongside in person ballots to prevent exactly this type of fuckery. Looking back, it does seem they took advantage of the pandemic to generate a ton of extra absentee ballots that they could plausibly hold back until after the in-person results were tabulated so they'd know exactly how many they'd need to come up with.
That definitely explains how the PA Attorney General was so confident that Biden would win PA "once all the votes were counted".
I remember CNN saying that Philadelphia was stopping the count until 5am the next morning.
But like an hour later, someone on the 538 blog made a post saying something to the effect of "I'm not sure where this rumor that philly stopped counting came from, but it's not true. You can see for yourself - they're doing it on livestream" and gave a link to the stream.
Now what I think actually happened is that they said they would stop UPDATING until 5am and CNN and others interpreted that as counting.
The bottom line, though.. whether they stopped counting or updating, the decision was made to stop counting and reporting by precinct and instead lump all the absentee ballots for the entire county together at some point. And that call just so happened to be made in a blue county in every swing state. I really can't think of any legitimate reasons to do that.
My state did it the best way, IMO, and reported precinct by precinct and the report included absentee votes, early votes and in-person election day votes all at once. Once a precinct reported, that was it. There was no pool of remaining ballots of some unknown size. Now I get that PA had a law preventing the opening of absentees before election day, and that would have made it harder in that they would have had to delay the in person reporting, but that's absolutely what they should have done.
But the thing is, to my knowledge, that did not apply in Georgia, Wisconsin, or Michigan. There is no reason they needed to be counting such a significant number of absentee ballots in the middle of the night.
In hindsight, we should have seen this coming and pressed for a national standard of counting and reporting absentee ballots alongside in person ballots to prevent exactly this type of fuckery. Looking back, it does seem they took advantage of the pandemic to generate a ton of extra absentee ballots that they could plausibly hold back until after the in-person results were tabulated so they'd know exactly how many they'd need to come up with.
That definitely explains how the PA Attorney General was so confident that Biden would win PA "once all the votes were counted".