Philadelphia Officials Defend 'Completely Transparent' Ballot Counting Process After Trump Campaign's Lawsuit
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Calm and careful counting has been going on throughout Pennsylvania since Tuesday, but that hasn't stopped the Trump campaign from alleging issues of "transparency." The campaign has filed a lawsuit trying to stop the counting of ballots in Pennsylvania.
There's still a lot of a whole lot of counting to be done because locally, Philadelphia, Montgomery, Delaware, Chester and Bucks Counties still have about 250,000 mail-in ballots that need to be processed. On a local level, officials are taking pride in their process.
"Philadelphia has been completely transparent in our election process," City Commissioner Lisa Deeley said.
The Trump campaign disagrees. On Wednesday afternoon, the president's team moved forward with legal action to pause the continued counting of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania unless Trump campaign workers are given more access to monitor the process.
"A live stream of our center has been available online for any member of the public, press or campaigns to view at any time," City Commissioner Al Schmidt said.
Schmidt, who is a Republican, added that campaign workers already have a physical presence inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
"You can see a group of observers from the campaigns standing at a close but also a safe distance from where the activity is, they are observing all of it," Schmidt said.
Philadelphia County has the largest mail-in ballot counting operation in the commonwealth, where over 350,000 mail-in ballots were cast.
"The delay we are seeing is a sign that the system is working," Gov. Tom Wolf said.
Eyewitness News visited a gym in Chester County as well where the task of counting almost 150,000 mail-in ballots continued on Wednesday evening.
"We are going to accurately county every single ballot," Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said.
Mail-in ballots that had been held for weeks began processing at 7 a.m. on Election Day. Machines have been running 24/7 ever since.
The machines can process about 10,000 votes per hour. The number of ballots could grow slightly because the deadline for those votes that have been mailed in to arrive is Friday. They just have to be postmarked by 5 p.m. Tuesday and that's the core of what the Trump campaign has taken issue with.
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