On Election Day 2020, I entered my local polling place in Philadelphia expecting to cast my vote for President when I was informed that because I had received a mail-in ballot I could not vote at the facility but would have to fill out a form known as a provisional ballot.

Provisional ballots, according to Wikipedia, are used to record a vote “when there are questions about a given voter’s eligibility that must be resolved before the vote can count.”

Yet I never received a mail-in ballot because two months prior to the election, I requested that my name be taken off the city’s mail-in ballot list (my name had been inadvertently added to the list by a housemate.) My name was then stricken from the list and I was assured that I would not experience problems voting in person on November 3. 

Sensing, perhaps, that I was upset at having to do a provisional ballot, a clerk at the polling place — who happened to be a neighbor — bent the rules and allowed me to vote by machine. That evening I rechecked my mail-in ballot status on a city website and read that I had received a mail-in ballot that was as yet unreturned, or “pending.” 

This is a tiny confusion compared to the post-election allegations of voter fraud reported in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and throughout the nation in 2020, yet it points to massive amounts of confusion, carelessness and even possible voter fraud generated by the mail-in ballot craze that year.

Voting just takes just one day, not weeks. 

Pennsylvania’s vote counting ended late on Election Night with President Trump in the lead but the counting picked up again in the wee hours, from 4 to 6 am, when boxes of mail-in ballots suddenly materialized. Where did they come from? 

The extra ballots were counted at the Pennsylvania Convention Center where Biden-Harris activists wasted no time in organizing a street watch rally known as “Count Every Vote.”

There was word of pandemonium at the Convention Center at 12th and Arch Streets on the day after the Election, so I headed down there to get a sense of things. 

The area was abuzz with activity. Two men with guns from Virginia had been arrested outside the Center where the mail-in ballots were being counted. Police were on the alert. Helicopters circled in the air around City Hall for hours as bands of police officers positioned themselves on street corners throughout Center City. Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard flanked the area around City Hall as groups of “Count Every Vote” wearing Out Now stickers scurried to 12th and Arch where they held hand signs and screamed “F-ck Donald Trump.” 

There was a lot of screaming. 

At 12th  and Arch Streets, a line of police officers divided Out Now protesters from Trump supporters. On the Trump side, several black- and brown-skinned rappers used a powerful sound system to belt out bombastic beats with Trump Train theme messages. The gritty and sometimes R-rated rap lines, so unlike anything usually associated with polite Republicans, reduced the Out Now people to stunned silence. A Trump supporter also bought pizza for the entire crowd as the anti-Trumpers on the other side shouting “F-ck Trump” looked on with envy. 

Television cameras were everywhere. I held — and waved — a Trump sign in front of the camera and wound up on 60 Minutes. Nieces and nephews I hadn’t talked to in a while left messages on my phone: “That was you, Uncle Thom!”

The scene had the look of a Hollywood movie set: A blonde woman in a MAGA hat wearing tight Stars and Stripes leotards did gymnastic flips while waving an oversized Trump flag. Multiple black and Latino Trump-Pence sign holders teamed up with a black youth in a man bun and dressed in a Mama Cass Eliot muumuu shouting through a bullhorn that Trump was The Great White Hope. This was not satire. 

At one point the Village People’s YMCA was played at full volume with MAGA inserted in place of YMCA. A brief moment of musical unity followed when a number of the Out Now contingent began moving their bodies to the music. 

Meanwhile, inside the Convention Center, the people charged with overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, both Democrat and Republican alike, were having difficulty seeing what was going on. Inside the counting room, observers were forced to stand behind metal gates, some as far as twenty-five feet away, while people at desks on the other side of the gates sorted through ballots. The observers could only see the motion of hands scribbling things on paper but what they were scribbling went unseen. One group of observers used small binoculars — I kid you not — to see what they hoped would be a bird’s eye view of the ballots. 

Mayor Kenney’s announcement that President Trump needed to “put his big boy pants on [and] acknowledge the fact that he lost and congratulate the winner,” was making the rounds. 

On Saturday, November 7, CNN and The New York Times announced that Joe Biden was President-Elect. But CNN, as one commentator observed, is merely “people, cameras and microphones,” and not a valid confirmation of presidential elections. 

That day, Philadelphia, being a Joe Biden town, went ballistic, with impromptu parades in the streets, the honking of horns and residents rushing out to the nearest Wine and Spirits store to buy bottles of champagne. 

Just two days after this street celebration, President Trump’s legal team headed by Rudy Giuliani, claimed that as many as 350,000 illegal votes cast in Philadelphia and 150,000 votes cast in Pittsburgh may have to be discarded because their verification was observed by no one. 

One can only hope we don’t encounter a similar — or worse fiasco — this time around. 

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.