While the state was conducting a legally required recount Thursday in the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race between incumbent Bob Casey and his GOP opponent Dave McCormick, a second news outlet called the race for McCormick. However, it appears that a supermajority-triggered recount will continue, and results from all 67 counties are expected to be reported to the Department of State (DOS) by November 26.
The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on Nov. 7, but Casey stood his ground, citing that there were still 100,000 votes left to be counted. Headquarters of the Decisions Office joined the AP on Thursday, projecting McCormick as the winner.
Under state law, an automatic recount is triggered when the margin of victory is 0.5% or less. According to unofficial DOS results as of Thursday afternoon, Casey received 48.53% of the vote and McCormick 48.89%.
Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said Thursday that just over 80,000 ballots remained to be counted as of Wednesday afternoon, including 20,000 mail-in and absentee ballots and about 60,000 provisional ballots. He said once counties finish examining all ballots, officials will immediately begin counting all votes cast in the Senate race.
“That’s almost 7 million paper ballots that our 67 county election offices will count at the end of the process,” Schmidt said. “During vote recounts, counties will use a different method or equipment to tabulate votes than those they use to produce unofficial results. This is to enable any potential issues with the statements to be identified.”
To stop the recount, Casey would have to concede or waive the recount by noon Wednesday. According to DOS, once the counting of votes begins in counties, it will not be possible to stop it. If Casey decides to step down before counties begin recounting votes, he or the entire campaign would have to notify DOS so the recount can be stopped, although there is very little time to do so. Counties must begin recounts no later than November 20.
During the recount of the 2021 Pennsylvania court race between Drew Crompton and Lori Dumas, Crompton acknowledged that a recount was already underway, so it continued as planned.
Schmidt estimated the cost of the recount would exceed $1 million, but the total would not be fully calculated until the results of the recount were released.
The U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania between Casey and McCormick heading to a recount
McCormick was in Washington this week, attending orientation meetings for up-to-date senators. On a call with reporters Thursday morning, McCormick campaign advisers said that even after the recount, Casey had “zero chance” of winning and noted the $1 million price tag.
Mark Harris, McCormick’s chief campaign strategist, and James Fitzpatrick, a campaign adviser, said in a telephone interview that Casey has no mathematical path to overtaking McCormick with the remaining ballots.
Fitzpatrick claimed that the Casey campaign advocated counting the votes of unregistered voters who cast provisional ballots. “This is a completely frivolous and baseless argument,” Fitzpatrick said during the interview. “The Casey campaign’s position is that it is up to them to confirm whether a voter is registered or not, not taking the word of local boards of elections and the SURE system,” referring to the statewide Uniform Voter Registry, a system election officials employ to update voter status, check voter registration and track voter rolls.
“Everyone knows that election boards and the SURE system determine who is registered and who is unregistered,” Fitzpatrick added, saying that any attempt to legitimize the vote count of unregistered voters “will result in legal action.”
people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or the Bureau of Decisions calls an election that it has any official significance, and it has none.
– Kathy Boockvar, former Commonwealth Secretary
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who supported President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign by handing out cash prizes to registered voters in swing states during the campaign, falsely accused the Casey campaign of “trying to change the outcome of the election by counting non-citizen votes,” claiming that “now without garden are openly committing crimes.”
State law includes a challenge procedure that allows provisional ballots to be reviewed to confirm whether a voter is registered before a final decision is made about his or her ballot. In several counties across the state, Democrats have filed challenges to boards of elections decisions rejecting provisional ballots cast by voters they were unable to verify through the voter registration system.
“No one is trying to count votes from people who were not registered. This is categorically untrue,” Adam Bonin, a lawyer working for the Casey campaign, said Thursday. “This is a blatant attempt to lie to the GOP and distract attention from its efforts to disenfranchise Pennsylvanians by discarding the votes of registered voters.”
The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit Thursday against all 67 county boards of elections, alleging that at least three counties openly defied state Supreme Court decisions by counting ballots with missing or incorrect dates on the outer envelopes. The lawsuit seeks to prevent undated ballots from being included in the final vote count.
RNC sues to keep undated absentee ballots from being counted as county absentee elections drag on
McCormick’s attorneys filed a similar lawsuit in Bucks County, alleging that Democrats on that county’s board of elections voted on Nov. 12 to count 405 undated and misdated absentee ballots, contrary to their own advice. “The commission’s decision is legally wrong because undated or misdated absentee ballots are legally invalid and cannot be counted in the 2024 general election – as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has already explained,” the lawsuit argues .
On Friday in Philadelphia, Fr A Court of Common Pleas judge denied McCormick’s request to boost the number of GOP observers when counting provisional ballots. McCormick dropped a second lawsuit seeking a “global challenge” to the provisional ballots.
His aides said on a call with reporters that their legal filings were intended to bring greater transparency to the process but did not indicate a lack of confidence in McCormick’s victory.
“Just because we believe we’re going to win doesn’t mean we’re going to tie our four hands behind our backs, right?” Harris said.
Fitzpatrick added that the campaign did not suggest there was an attempt to deliberately devalue the ballots, but said human error sometimes occurs “and that’s why observers can watch” the counting of provisional ballots.
“While McCormick and his allies work to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters and spread disinformation, we are working to make sure the voices of Pennsylvanians are heard,” Tiernan Donohue, Casey’s campaign manager, said in a statement.
Kathy Boockvar, president of Athena Strategies and former Pennsylvania secretary of state, said Thursday that the Pennsylvania lawsuit is progressing as required and that comparisons between the Casey campaign’s actions and Republicans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results are unwarranted.
“We have a state statute that clearly says that if a race is within 0.5%, there is an automatic statewide recount, right? This is a state law written in statute that has been in force for 20 years,” she said. “So he’s literally allowing the state process to happen.”
She added that what Republicans did during the last presidential election cycle was refuse to accept the results after the election had already been certified.
Boockvar said the practice of “calling” elections “has done more damage to the perception of elections than many other things because people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or the Deciding Office calls an election that it has any official significance, and it doesn’t,” she said. . “The Associated Press and other election ‘calling’ organizations exist solely to meet people’s need for quick answers in a process that is not designed to be quick for good reasons.”
She added that Pennsylvania and other states have until nearly three weeks after the election to announce results. – And there’s a good reason for that. We want accuracy more than anything else.”
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