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Biden Pulls Ahead By Narrow Margin In Pennsylvania

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

All right, we're going to turn now to NPR's Alina Selyukh, who is in Philadelphia covering this latest news. Good morning, Alina.

ALINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: Good morning.

MARTIN: So to say again, according to data from The Associated Press, former Vice President Joe Biden has taken the lead in Pennsylvania this morning. We want to emphasize that the AP has not called this race. What more can you tell us at this point?

SELYUKH: Right. So as Tam was saying, it all came down - today specifically - just this flip came down to a new batch of votes being processed in Philadelphia. There are still over 100,000 ballots left statewide. The secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, yesterday kind of hinted pretty heavily - and she has been saying this all week - that they were expecting to have sort of a more clear winner by today. So that's something we're watching today. In the past few days, which - I was going to say weeks. It's been only a few days.

MARTIN: Right.

SELYUKH: In the past few days, they - the mail-in ballots have been sort of in focus. And the mail-in ballots have been in Joe Biden's favor in the ratio of 2 to 1, 3 to 1. And so if that maintains, his lead is expected to grow in the next few hours.

MARTIN: So let's talk about the challenge that the president is waging. I mean, we heard him last night make several baseless claims last night about what he calls fraud in the vote. They have filed suit. President Trump and his lawyers have filed suit to stop the counting in Pennsylvania and to get more access for GOP election monitors. Can you just get us up to speed on what the legal challenges look like in Pennsylvania right now?

SELYUKH: There are several of them. Yesterday, a lot of focus was on this one particular sort of area of focus for the Trump campaign - which is what you're saying - this question about access. In a matter of a day, it got resolved in the sense that a federal judge, a district judge here, dismissed the case after all the parties were able to agree to a new deal where both Republican and Democratic observers were going to have more numbers of them. There are also sort of conversations and legal challenges related to absentee ballots and the idea of these late-arriving ballots. And I'm sure we'll hear more about that today.

MARTIN: All right, NPR's Alina Selyukh on the ground in Philadelphia for us with this breaking news. Thanks, Alina.

SELYUKH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Alina Selyukh is a business correspondent at NPR, where she follows the path of the retail and tech industries, tracking how America's biggest companies are influencing the way we spend our time, money, and energy.
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