There are still a few votes left to be counted in Pa.’s hotly contested primary. House in West Philly, but it seems likely that state Rep. Amen Brown will retain his 10th District seat by a very slim margin.
As of Friday afternoon, Brown had a 50-vote lead over the likely runner-up, progressive community organizer Cass Green. The difference is approximately 0.7% of the total number of votes. Brown had 2,971 votes to Green’s 2,921 of the 7,395 votes counted so far.
Radio host Sajda Blackwell received 1,478 votes and 25 write-ins. Since no Republicans are running for the seat, the winner of the Democratic primary is expected to win the November general election.
Most of the ballots that still need to be checked and possibly counted have ephemeral, which voters typically cast when questions arise about their eligibility to vote. The City Commissioners’ Office is still evaluating some absentee ballots with signature or date errors to determine whether they can be counted.
Theoretically, if Green receives more than 50 votes, he could still win over Brown.
However, the number of voters who not only returned provisional ballots but also made the effort to vote in the state race – particularly for Green – is almost certainly too compact to change the outcome, especially given the historically low turnout in this year .
Temporary reserves “are pretty rare,” City Commissioner Lisa Deeley said Friday. “Historically, we haven’t seen much in this district, and most people don’t take the time to vote provisionally to get all the way to the legislative races.”
A turbulent second term
A win for Brown would make the race something of a repeat of the 2020 primary. Four years ago, he defeated Green by 183 votes out of 7,689 votes cast, or about 2.4%, and Blackwell played a spoiler for Green, finishing third with a slightly higher vote total than this year.
Since then, Brown has turbulent term, his second as a state representative. The Inquirer discovered (*10*)repeated accusations of irregularities in his business activities, including unpaid taxes, failure to repay investments and a felony charge, later dropped, for fraudulently purchasing a home from a deceased man.
A relatively moderate Democrat who supports anti-crime policies and is an advocate for charter schools, he ran for mayor last year and finished a distant sixth in the primary. He was almost thrown off the ballot several times for missing documents.
Green and others criticized him for accepting enormous campaign contributions from Jeffrey Yass, a conservative billionaire hedge fund manager who supports the expansion of charter schools and financed anti-progressive PACs in Philadelphia’s elections.
Meanwhile, greenery is part of the city’s growing progressive movement. She worked for District Attorney Larry Krasner and gained the support of him, the SEIU teachers union, former councilor Helen Gymand Working Families Party board members Kendra Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke.
She has been an energetic fundraiser, contributing nearly $213,000 this year to Brown’s $78,000, according to the state’s campaign finance website.
However, Brown appears to have partially won dramatically improving their performances in a section of Center City that was added to his district several years ago, the Inquirer reported. Perhaps there was one factor support of the Democratic Committee in the 8th district, an “open district” whose members democratically choose whom to support.
A recount is unlikely to change the results
Deeley said city commissioners and their staff were checking erroneous absentee ballots Friday and deciding which ones were eligible to be counted. There are also a compact number of postal voters whose identities could not be verified; they have until Monday to contact the office and resolve these issues.
Provisional ballots will be counted Monday at the city election warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia in a process open to observers, Deeley said. Each provisional application will be checked to ensure that the individual is eligible to vote.
She added that the 10th District race is the only one in which the vote counting process is very popular this year.
A candidate or voter could also try to request a recount, but such a request may fail, and even if it did, it would likely not significantly change the results.
Very similar vote counts in statewide races, such as for governor or U.S. Senate, automatically trigger recalculationbut this is not the case in local and legislative races.
Another state law states that in any precinct, three voters can pay a $50 fee and file a petition in court stating that they believe there was fraud or error in the vote. The judge then decides whether there is indeed a problem justifying a potentially steep series of vote counts to verify that the vote totals are correct.
This process has become increasingly popular in recent years, as it was then election denial groups organized multi-county petitions in support of Doug Mastriano’s unsuccessful 2022 bid for governor. Such petitions are typically rejected for lack of evidence. Meanwhile, conflicting judicial opinions have led to some confusion regarding the requirements for requesting a recount.
