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Certifying vote totals makes unofficial results official in hotly contested presidential race

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Kerry Roberts of Washington Township didn’t plan to sit out the Nov. 3 election, but he said the absentee ballot he requested through a state representative’s office in late October didn’t arrive on time.

“It didn’t come in until after the fourth so I couldn’t do anything with it,” he said last week in a phone conversation.

Postmarked Nov. 4, the absentee ballot was among the pieces of mail he found after returning to his Fayette County home Nov. 8 from a trip he made to Georgia for business and medical reasons.

“I was pretty disgusted,” he said Thursday. “I’ve never absentee voted before, and I wouldn’t plan to do it again,” volunteering, “I’m a Republican. I would’ve voted for (Donald) Trump.”

The president, also a Republican, hadn’t as of Monday afternoon conceded to former vice president Joe Biden, a Democrat who expects the Electoral College to cast in his favor more than 300 affirmations. The winner must have at least 270. Trump trails with a projected 232.

But Roberts has no plans to protest the result of the presidential election.

“I will accept whatever it is,” Roberts, 77, continued. “I’m not a lawyer. I can’t do anything about it. It just was a bad deal as far as I was concerned.”

Of former president Barack Obama, Roberts said, “I was definitely not for him. But we lived through it.”

Monday was the deadline for counties to submit certified election results to the Pennsylvania Department of State.

The Washington County Election Board signed election returns on Friday and Elections Director Melanie Ostrander was planning to submit them by the deadline.

On Friday, Washington County opened and counted what are known as “naked cured” provisional ballots cast by people whose initial mail-in votes were found to be in some way deficient, such as lacking a secrecy envelope. Poll watchers notified voters of the situation.

Counted and segregated were 93 ballots postmarked by the close of the polls Nov. 3, but delivered to the elections office Nov. 4-6.

“That’s how the U.S. Supreme Court said to do it,” Ostrander said. “We’re following the order from Justice (Samuel) Alito that we are to keep those results segregated from our other results.”

Fayette County Election Bureau Director Larry Blosser submitted the information on Thursday and Friday of last week, after the first signing of results by the county election board. There were no “naked cured” ballots; neither were late-arriving mail-in ballots included in the Fayette totals.

There was a flurry of activity on the Southwestern Pennsylvania county election front Monday.

The Greene County Election Board signed the initial certification on Thursday, and members will wait until Tuesday afternoon, the last day of a final certification five-day waiting period, according to Chairman Mike Belding.

Trump overwhelmingly carried Washington, Fayette, Westmoreland and Greene counties, but trailed in several eastern Pennsylvania counties in Philadelphia, its suburbs and Lackawanna County, where Biden was born.

Allegheny County Election Board split 2-1 in favor of certifying its results, with two Democrats in the majority. Allegheny County has slightly more than 3,000 votes in several categories that were held in abeyance pending the outcome of court cases, and 254 unopened and unprocessed provisional ballots.

In Allegheny, the Biden ticket racked up 429,065 votes to Trump’s 282,324.

Westmoreland County officials met Monday morning, then reconvened in the late afternoon, ultimately certifying votes that are not being challenged in the courts, and some provisional ballots.

Sean Kertes, chairman of the Board of Commissioners and the Election Board, said certification does not apply to the 45th State Senatorial District, where incumbent Democrat Jim Brewster was battling Republican Nicole Zicarelli.

“The Department of State continues to work closely with and support all 67 counties as they work to complete the election certification process,” spokeswoman Wanda Murren wrote in response to an email inquiry about other counties.

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