Vote-by-mail vote count in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Matt Slocum / AP
Already on the day after the day of Tuesday, November 3, Pennsylvania has become the center of the electoral universe of the United States, in the perfect storm, with an unprecedented anxiety around the vote count that could end in the Supreme Court, as happened with Florida in the 2000 elections between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
The reasons why Pennsylvania has become a plebiscite delusion - which can end up deciding the 2020 elections - range from the procedure that was established for the counting of votes by mail, to changes in the electoral rules established last fall and of course to the pandemic.
Of course, both the Democratic Governor, Tom Wolfe, and the Republican Capitol of Pennsylvania are largely responsible for having led the country to the nightmare that the electoral dawn has become, due to their inability to put a system in motion. That would not allow for counting from Election Day to perhaps more than three million votes mailed.
That bottleneck in the count, that chaos, is the one that President Donald Trump has taken advantage of to demand that the entire vote count stop.
All the polls showed that state, with 20 decisive electoral votes to tip the balance from one side or the other, as one of the most competitive of the elections, with a slight Trump advantage over Biden.
The outbreak of the pandemic led to the assumption that many citizens were going to choose to vote by mail, that there would be a very important increase in this type of suffrage.
In 2016, some 266,000 Pennsylvanians used that method to vote.
In these 2020 elections, there could be three million votes that, by law, must be verified, processed and counted from the day of the election on Tuesday, November 3, and up to three days.
That would postpone the final result until Friday.
And there is the key.
Due to partisan struggles, which have become state legislation, those votes have not been tabulated in advance, and those responsible have been expressly prohibited from starting the recount.
The same has not happened, for example, with Georgia, where the development of the count began more than two weeks before the presidential elections.
Florida also allowed voting by mail to be processed three weeks before the election.
And other States gave the green light for this to be counted as it arrived, to add it on November 3 to the votes in person and thus have results on the day of the elections.
But in Pennsylvania, it became clear that vote-by-mail would not start counting until Wednesday, November 4.
That's why Pennsylvania Secretary of State, Democrat Kathy Boockvar, warned that it would be premature to declare victory.
"Everyone should be patient," Boockvar said.
"Our priority is to count accurately and safely each and every one of the votes that have been cast legally."
Of course, the Democrat did not count on the impatience of the president, who had insistently declared, and confirmed this early Wednesday morning, that the electoral result should be known on Tuesday night.
Trump considered that the ballots that are counted from that moment are fraudulent.
And here comes the ghost of 2000, when in agony there was no presidential winner until December.
The result was decided by the highest judicial authority in the country, the Supreme Court.
Trump has assured this morning from the White House that he will go to the Supreme Court to challenge the count of the vote by mail.
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