Joe Biden has taken the lead in the Georgia and Pennsylvania vote counts as election results continue to trickle in.
In Pennsylvania, Biden held 3,295,319 votes to Trump’s 3,289,725 with 98 percent of ballots reported as of Friday morning, according to the Associated Press. Around 163,000 mail-in ballots remain to be counted, according to the state’s elections website.
Roughly 35,000 ballots from Allegheny County, a Democrat-leaning district home to the city of Pittsburgh, were set to be reviewed by 5 p.m. on Friday. About 29,000 of those ballots have been set aside for review by federal court order.
Another 6,800 ballots will be reviewed for possible issues including damage or lack of secrecy envelopes.
Meanwhile in Georgia, Biden’s lead stood at just 918 votes with over 99 percent of the results tallied. If Biden were to win the state, he would be the first Democratic presidential candidate favored by Georgia voters since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Around 10,000 absentee ballots remain to be counted, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Of those ballots, about 4,800 were from Gwinnett County, which is home to the Democrat-leaning city of Atlanta and surrounding suburbs. Vote counts have been especially slow this year because of high levels of mail-in voting, brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Officials in numerous counties are continuing to count ballots, with strong security protocols in place to protect the integrity of our election,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said on Thursday. “It’s important to act quickly, but it’s more important to get it right.”