From high above, Pennsylvania's landscape looks like a typical November fall day. But at ground level, it's the vista of a swing state in the middle of a highly contested presidential election. Voters tell Scripps News it's been a lot to deal with.
"It's been very overwhelming," said Emerald Walker, who lives in Lancaster and is voting in her first presidential election. "You can't avoid it because you see it on the commercials, ads everywhere and I'm just ready for it to be over with, honestly."
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It's a sentiment echoed by other Pennsylvania voters, too.
"[It's] exhausting — we've taken to watching TV channels that don't even air those ads because it's just been exhausting," said voter Bill Finlay.
As the swing state with the highest number of Electoral College votes, Pennsylvania is under scrutiny. Its patchwork of voting-related laws can vary across the 67 counties, sowing confusion and creating an opening for litigation. In turn, judges in several counties extended the deadline for voters to be able to get a mail-in or absentee ballot.
Voters here, though, said separating fact from fiction can be tough.
"It's too much — it's just too much. It deters you from voting because you don't know the facts and each party is blaming the other, or lies or whatever conspiracies and stuff like that, so it's hard — but at the end, you try to make your right choice," said Pennsylvania voter Nereida Montanez.
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With the two major presidential candidates neck and neck, the state's election officials say they are aiming for accuracy and not necessarily speed.
There's one main reason Pennsylvania tends to be slower than other states when it comes to counting ballots.
Unlike other states, where they start counting early and absentee ballots as they come in, Pennsylvania law says ballots cannot be counted until election day. That can potentially involve millions of ballots needing to be counted, while simultaneously running 9,000 polling places across the state on Election Day.
