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Why it might take Pennsylvania and Wisconsin longer to count ballots than other states

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Why it might take Pennsylvania and Wisconsin longer to count ballots than other states


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While the nation’s eyes Tuesday night will be on a handful of swing states expected to determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, it may not be known for days who won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. State laws governing when ballots can be processed in those states may mean a repeat of 2020, when it wasn’t until the Saturday after the election that Pennsylvania’s results gave Democratic nominee Joe Biden the votes needed to secure a majority in the Electoral College.

In response to that days-long wait, many states overhauled their election laws to make it faster to count vote by mail, absentee and overseas ballots. While Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are often lumped with Michigan in the “blue wall” of Rust Belt swing states, they now differ in one important way: Michigan allows election workers to begin tabulating mailed-in ballots more than a week before Election Day, though the results cannot be revealed until after the polls close.

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But the state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have not made similar changes to election procedures and experts expect their results to come in later than Michigan, or the other swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.

The Keystone and Badger states each prohibit election officials from beginning to open and count absentee ballots until 7 a.m. Election Day, when they must also deal with in-person voting.

The Pennsylvania State Secretary’s office describes it this way on its website: “Hundreds of thousands – sometimes millions – of mail ballots are cast in every election, and current state law does not permit counties to begin opening these ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. That means county election officials cannot even remove the ballots from the envelopes and prepare them to be scanned until that time – on a day when those same officials are also running more than 9,000 polling places across the state.”

No preprocessing of vote by mail or absentee ballots

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 43 states allow pre-processing of mail-in ballots, which includes verifying the voter’s information and eligibility on the mail ballot envelope, opening the envelope, and removing the ballot.

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Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, said the inability to do preprocessing doesn’t mean Pennsylvania or Wisconsin are slow, has fraud or that there is any problem with their procedures.

“Not every state is created equal, right? So if you’re from Florida, you’re going to get results a little quicker, simply because we have 22 days of pre-processing,” she said. “If you’re in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, by law, they’re not allowed to start until Election Day. So it’s just a quick numbers game. It doesn’t mean that Florida is more efficient or less efficient than some of their counterparts. It just means that the laws are a little different.” 

‘People have to be patient’

Local election clerks in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have repeatedly pushed state lawmakers since 2020 to allow preprocessing, said Lawrence Norden, Vice President of the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. 

In “Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, the election officials have been begging for years, and certainly since 2020, to allow them to process mail ballots earlier, the way they do in most of the other battleground states, so that on election night they just press a button and can have the results. Their state legislatures wouldn’t do it,” he said.

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Because the state legislatures didn’t act, local officials have sought to solve the problem on their own.

In Pennsylvania, the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate couldn’t agree on a bill that would allow early processing. Republicans wanted to tie it to expanded voter ID requirements, Democrats refused. When Republicans controlled both chambers in 2021 they expanded voter ID requirements, and the Democratic governor vetoed it.

Pennsylvania has made improvements since 2020, and it is not expected to take until the weekend to count all the ballots this time. County election directors have now had multiple cycles working with vote-by-mail and have received millions of dollars through a state-funded grant program that allowed some to purchase machines to help more quickly open and sort mailed ballots.

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Abigail Gardner, a spokesperson for the Allegheny County government, said staff are expecting up to 250,000 absentee ballots and about 450,000 in-person votes. She said vote counting might be faster than it was in 2020 because they are expecting fewer absentee ballots, and they have brought on more staff and purchased high-speed envelope openers.

In Wisconsin, where Republicans control both chambers of the legislature, a Republican-led effort to allow for early canvassing stalled in the Senate in February. The state Assembly had passed a bill in November that would allow election workers to begin processing absentee ballots the day before an election. The Democratic governor had said he would sign the bill if it reached him.

Local election officials can choose to count vote-by-mail ballots either at the ballot locations or at a central location. Most of the larger jurisdictions have chosen central locations and have bought high-speed machines to speed up processing, Marge Bostelmann, member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told USA TODAY. 

“It may be a little quicker, but it really all depends on how quickly the ballots can be input and how quickly the machine will read them after they’re put into the machine,” Bostelmann said.

In Wisconsin, over 1.2 million absentee and vote by mail ballots had already been received as of Oct. 31, according to the state Elections Commission. In 2020, Wisconsin’s result was called by the Associated Press around 2 p.m. the day after the election. Multiple state election officials have warned that it could be the middle of the night, or sometime Wednesday before the mail-in ballots are counted.

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Jay Heck, executive director of the good-government watchdog Common Cause in Wisconsin, said in-person voting in his state is expected to be counted before midnight on Election Day. But tabulating absentee ballots for the combined unofficial results could take until 2 a.m., he said.

“People have to be patient,” Heck said.

In 2020, Trump declared victory before the votes were all counted

Last time, then-President Donald Trump, who is again the Republican nominee in 2024, didn’t wait for the mail-in votes to be counted: he declared victory while he was ahead because his supporters had been more likely to vote in person. Then, he made false accusations of late-night “ballot dumps” of illegal votes when the mail-in ballots had been counted and added to the totals, something that in many states occurred in the middle of the night.

When the final vote count showed Biden winning Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes, Trump claimed without evidence the election was being stolen from him in the state. Trump also claimed fraud when Biden won Wisconsin by 20,700 votes.

Polls have consistently shown a very tight race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in every swing state, including Wisconsin, where Trump leads Harris 48% to 47% according to a late October USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, and Pennsylvania, where Trump leads by less than 1 percentage point in the FiveThirtyEight polling average.

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Trump has told his rallies to expect a big victory on Tuesday, saying Oct. 30 he could only envision losing “if it was a corrupt election.”

“If there are tens of millions of people who believe that this election can only be won by one candidate, you can imagine the shock that might occur if that candidate loses, and the way that could be leveraged into anger and potentially violence in the post election period,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said.

‘Just don’t have the money or the staffing’

In Pennsylvania, there is the added wrinkle that some people vote by mail in place of early in person voting. Many counties without early voting allow people to apply in person for a vote by mail ballot, then they can fill it out and immediately drop in off.

As of Oct. 31, nearly 2.2 million absentee and vote by mail ballots had already been received, according to the state.

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Data from Pennsylvania shows that while Republicans are increasing voting by mail, they are still outnumbered substantially by the number of Democrats.

Widener University Political Science Professor Wesley Leckrone, an expert on Pennsylvania politics, said he expects the larger population centers to process those ballots quickly because they have the money to hire staff. His concern is the surrounding high-population suburban counties that are key to determining the winner won’t be able to process results Tuesday and it could be later in the week before the outcome is known.

“There’s a lot of counties that just don’t have the money or the staffing to be able to do this,” he said. “It could well be Trump will be up at 10 o’clock on Tuesday night but not all the mail in ballots have been brought in.”



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Pennsylvania-born indie rockers Tigers Jaw return with new album release

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Pennsylvania-born indie rockers Tigers Jaw return with new album release


The chorus for the song “Primary Colors” was something Walsh wrote years ago, with the song’s outro originally being used as a verse.

“And something just wasn’t quite clicking, and everything that I tried felt kind of forced,” Walsh said. “We were all just like, ‘Yeah, there’s something here, but it’s not quite doing what I think it has the potential to do.’”

The band then started toying with the dynamics between the verses and the chorus.

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“It just unlocked something for me in the idea where I was like, ‘Wow, this kind of quiet, loud, quiet, loud format really works well with this song,’” Walsh said. “So yeah, it just transformed it instantly into an idea that felt a lot stronger.”

The album was recorded with Grammy-winning producer Will Yip, a relationship still budding from their 2014 album, “Charmer.” Collins said the new album’s sound is “as true as we could be to playing the record live.”

“I wasn’t as tied to the tones that have classically been Tigers Jaw because I think at this point, I’ve just come to this realization that no matter what, if we’re making it, it is Tigers Jaw,” Collins said.

The new album has a “palpable energy” that shares the same spirit as their earlier records, Walsh said. And while “tastes evolve,” the band followed “what feels good.”

“This is the best representation of the band at the time, and it’s almost like a snapshot of us as artists, as people, as a creative entity over this time in our career,” he said.

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“Lost On You” is out now through Hopeless Records and is available on vinyl, CD and various streaming platforms.

“Lost On You” was released on March 27, 2026, through Hopeless Records. The album is available on vinyl, CD and various streaming platforms.

On April 16, Tigers Jaw will perform at Union Transfer at 8 p.m. They will be supported by Hot Flash Heat Wave and Creeks, the solo project of Balance and Composure vocalist and guitarist Jon Simmons, who is from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.





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Pennsylvania court upends mandatory use of life-without-parole for second-degree murder

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Pennsylvania court upends mandatory use of life-without-parole for second-degree murder


What to Know

  • Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court says the state cannot automatically give life without parole for felony murder without weighing each defendant’s culpability in the killing.
  • The high court on Thursday ordered a new sentencing hearing for Derek Lee over a second-degree conviction, but paused it for four months to give state lawmakers time to consider legislation in response.
  • Pennsylvania law has made people liable for second-degree murder if they participated in an eligible felony that led to death. Life with no possibility of parole has been the only possible sentence.
  • The court says the current rule treats a lookout the same as the person who kills.

Pennsylvania’s high court on Thursday overturned the use of automatic life sentences without parole for people convicted of second-degree murder, saying it violates the state’s constitutional ban on cruel punishment when imposed without a closer look at the defendant’s specific role and culpability.

The court majority ordered resentencing in the case of Derek Lee, convicted of a 2014 killing in Pittsburgh, but the decision also has implications for others among the roughly 1,000 other inmates currently serving similar second-degree murder sentences.

The court’s order was put on hold for four months to give the General Assembly time to “consider appropriate remedial measures.” In a footnote, the justices said they were ruling on Lee’s sentence and not addressing “questions of retroactivity.”

Prison reform groups hailed it as a landmark decision, while the Allegheny County district attorney’s office said it will follow the court’s order.

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Pennsylvania law has made people liable for second-degree murder if they participated in an eligible felony that led to death, and life without parole has been the only possible sentence.

“The mandatory penalty scheme of life without parole for all offenders convicted of second degree murder fails to assess individual culpability regarding the intent to kill, and mandates the same punishment regardless of that culpability,” wrote Chief Justice Debra Todd in the lead opinion. She characterized it as not distinguishing “between the lookout, and the killer who pulls the trigger.”

The state high court’s decision comes after years of advocacy to undo mandatory life without parole sentences both in Pennsylvania and nationally. Nazgol Ghandnoosh of the Washington-based Sentencing Project said she counts 11 states and the federal system as having such laws for that kind of crime, sometimes called felony murder. Several states — California, Colorado and Minnesota — have moved away from that sentencing framework in recent years, she said.

Justice Kevin Dougherty noted in a separate opinion that unlike those convicted of first-degree murder, defendants serving life without parole for second-degree murder have “never been found by a judge or jury to have harbored the specific intent to kill” and may not have had “any involvement whatsoever with the actual killing. He or she does not even have to expect or foresee that a life may be taken.”

Lee’s lawyers had wanted the court to rule that life without parole sentences are unconstitutional for all second-degree murder convictions in Pennsylvania, said Quinn Cozzens, a staff attorney for the Abolitionist Law Center, which helped represent Lee. Instead, the court ruled that trial judges must examine the individual circumstances of a defendant’s case to decide which sentence is most appropriate, including the potential of life without parole.

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The state’s public defenders’ association said the ruling will generate new post-conviction litigation and require them to do more investigation as well as develop “strategic litigation” to get the decision to apply retroactively.

A jury convicted Lee of second-degree murder but acquitted him of first-degree murder in 44-year-old Leonard Butler’s shooting death. Butler was shot in a struggle over a gun with Lee’s codefendant, Paul Durham.

Prosecutors argued it should be up to state lawmakers and the executive branch to address the policy issues surrounding second-degree murder sentences. Todd wrote that while the district attorney’s office “acknowledges that there may be persuasive arguments why a non-slayer should not be held to the same degree of culpability as the slayer, it stresses that these are policy decisions for the General Assembly.”

Cozzens urged lawmakers to “address this constitutional violation, given that the court granted them the opportunity to do so.”

Rep. Tim Briggs, a suburban Philadelphia Democrat who chairs the state House Judiciary Committee, said he planned to engage with Senate Republicans on potential legislation in response.

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Briggs said he wanted to have decision apply retroactively, to give people serving life “for being the getaway driver” to “have the opportunity to have their facts looked at again.”

“I think inaction leaves a lot of this up to the courts to decide. I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” Briggs said. “We have a policymaking role here.”

Justice Sallie Mundy wrote that Lee “willingly participated in an armed home invasion and robbery, and purposefully engaged in assaultive behavior in the form of tasing and pistol-whipping the victim.” She said Lee and Durham “arguably kidnapped the victims by forcing them into the basement” and it will be up to the county judge to decide if Lee’s life-without-parole sentence is appropriate.

Todd’s opinion, citing an advocacy group, said 73% of those convicted of felony murder in Pennsylvania were 25 or younger when the killing occurred and almost 70% are Black people.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro also responded to the ruling on X.

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Teen boys in Pennsylvania get probation after using AI to create fake nude photos of classmates

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Teen boys in Pennsylvania get probation after using AI to create fake nude photos of classmates


Lancaster Country Day School in Lancaster, Pa., Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

LANCASTER, Pa. — Two teenage boys who used artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of their classmates at an exclusive private school in Pennsylvania received probation Wednesday after dozens of victims described the images’ traumatizing effect on them.

The boys were 14 at the time. They admitted this month that they made about 350 images, showing at least 59 girls under 18, along with other victims who so far have not been identified.

Authorities said the boys took images of the girls from school photos, yearbooks, Instagram, TikTok and FaceTime chats in 2023 and 2024, and morphed them with images of adults depicting nudity or sexual activity.

More than 100 students and parents from Lancaster Country Day School were in court to hear victims describe the shock of having to identify their own faces in pornographic photos to detectives. Juvenile proceedings in Pennsylvania are normally closed, but this was opened by the judge, providing an unusual opportunity for the community to be seen and heard.

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The girls described the fallout — anxiety attacks, a loss of trust, problems focusing on schoolwork and a fear that the images may someday surface in unexpected ways.

The two young men stood stone-faced throughout, flanked by their lawyers and parents, as they were called pedophiles, “sick and twisted” and perverted.

“I will never understand why they did this,” one victim told Judge Leonard Brown, saying it “destroyed my innocence.”

One young woman told Brown “how excruciating it is to bring these feelings up again and again.” Another choked back tears as she excoriated one of the defendants for expressing “fake empathy” as girls confided with him about their pain, before it became known that he had been part of creating and disseminating the images. Still another said all of her friends transferred schools, and that she “needed trauma therapy to even walk around my neighborhood.”

The defendants declined several opportunities to comment to the judge, who said he had not heard either boy take responsibility or apologize.

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“This has been a regrettable, long, torturous process for everyone involved,” said Heidi Freese, defense attorney for one of the defendants. “There were very interesting, underlying legal issues surrounding the charges in this case and those will be decided on a different day in a different case.”

Brown ordered each to perform 60 hours of community service, have no contact with the victims and pay an unspecified amount of restitution. If they don’t have any additional legal problems, Brown said, the case can be expunged after two years.

As he imposed his sentence, Brown said that if they were adults, they probably would be headed for state prison. He said they should “take this opportunity to really examine” themselves.

The resolution of the Pennsylvania case comes days after three teenagers in Tennessee sued Elon Musk’s xAI, claiming the company’s Grok tools morphed their real photos into explicitly sexual images. The high school students are seeking class-action status to represent what the lawsuit says are thousands of people who were similarly victimized as minors.

The scandal in Pennsylvania led to a student protest, criminal charges against the two teenagers and the departure of leaders at the school, which says it has about 600 students K-12, class sizes averaging just 12 kids, and “an endowment in excess of $25 million.”

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Nadeem Bezar, a Philadelphia lawyer who represents at least 10 of the victims, said Tuesday he expects to file a claim “against the school and anybody else we think has culpability in these deepfakes being created and disseminated.”

He said he has not yet seen the photos but expects the legal process to determine “exactly when and where and how the school knew, how the boys created these images, what platforms they used to create these images and how they were disseminated.”

As AI has become accessible and powerful, lawmakers across the country have passed laws aimed at barring deepfakes.

President Donald Trump signed the Take it Down Act last year, making it illegal to publish intimate images including deepfakes without consent, and requiring websites and social media sites to remove such material within 48 hours of being notified by a victim.

Forty-six states now have laws addressing deepfakes, with legislation introduced in the remaining four — Alaska, Missouri, New Mexico and Ohio — according to the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

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Associated Press writers Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed.





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