Mail inspectors in Pennsylvania turned up more than 1,700 ballots at postal facilities across the state on Thursday, according to U.S. Postal Service data filed in court overnight.
The vast majority of those mail-in ballots were discovered in Democratic strongholds, nearly 1,400 of which are in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Mail inspectors found an additional 266 ballots in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley region.
Those votes, along with any additional ballots received before Friday afternoon, will be sequestered pending a Republican-led effort to have thrown them out.
Meanwhile, mail inspectors found more than 500 ballots in North Carolina following sweeps there.
These twice-daily sweeps were ordered Thursday morning by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., as part of a lawsuit brought by the NAACP against the U.S. Postal Service and its embattled leader, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, claiming that a series of cost-cutting measures imposed at the mail agency over the summer threatened to disenfranchise people of color.
