Dave McCormick walks through the U.S. Capitol as reporters ask him questions on Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024. (Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)
As the state continued Thursday with the legally mandated recount in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race between incumbent Bob Casey and his Republican opponent Dave McCormick, a second news source called the race for McCormick. But it appears the recount triggered by the vote margin will continue, with all 67 provinces expected to report their results to the Department of State (DOS) by November 26.
The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on November 7, but Casey did not concede, citing the 100,000 ballots that had yet to be counted. Decision-making office head office joined the AP on Thursday in projecting McCormick as the winner.
Under state law, an automatic recount is triggered when the winning margin is 0.5% or less. As of Thursday afternoon, unofficial results from the DOS website showed Casey with 48.53% of the vote and McCormick with 48.89%.
Commonwealth Secretary 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 have collected all the ballots, county officials will immediately proceed with a recount of every ballot cast in the Senate race.
“That’s nearly 7 million paper ballots that our 67 county elections offices will recount as they complete the process,” Schmidt said. “During the recount, counties will use a different method or equipment to tabulate votes than what they use to compile their unofficial results. This is done to ensure that any tabulation issues can be identified.”
To stop the recount, Casey would have had to concede or abandon a recount by noon on Wednesday. According to DOS, once the recount starts in the provinces, it cannot be stopped. If Casey decided to concede before counties began the recount, he or the campaign would have to alert DOS so the recount could be halted, although there is very little time to do so. Counties must begin the recount no later than November 20.
In the recount of the 2021 race for the Commonwealth Court in Pennsylvania, between Drew Crompton and Lori Dumas, Crompton conceded after the recount was well underway, so it went ahead as planned.
Schmidt estimated the cost of the recount would be more than $1 million, but the total will not be fully calculated by the time the recount results are released.
The US Senate race between Casey and McCormick in Pennsylvania is heading for a recount
McCormick was in Washington, DC this week, where he participated in the orientation for new senators. On a call with reporters Thursday morning, McCormick campaign advisers said Casey had “zero chance” of winning even with the recount and noted the $1 million price tag.
Mark Harris, chief strategist for the McCormick campaign, and James Fitzpatrick, an adviser to the campaign, said on the call that there was no mathematical path for Casey to overtake McCormick with the remaining ballots.
Fitzpatrick claimed that the Casey campaign was advocating for unregistered voters who cast provisional ballots to have their votes counted. “This is a completely frivolous and meritless argument,” Fitzpatrick said during the call. “The Casey campaign’s position is that they should be the ones to confirm whether a voter is registered or not, without taking the word from the local board of elections and the SURE system,” referring to the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, the system election officials use to update voter status, verify voter registration, and track mail-in ballots.
“Everyone knows that the boards of elections and the SURE system determine who is and who is not registered,” Fitzpatrick added, saying that any attempt to legitimize the counting of votes of unregistered voters “will be met with lawsuits. ”
people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or the Decision Desk calls an election that that has any official relevance, and it doesn’t.
– Kathy Boockvar, former Secretary of the Commonwealth
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 votes of non-citizens,” claiming that they were “now openly committing crime.”
State law includes a challenge process that allows for a review of provisional ballots to confirm whether a voter is registered before a final decision on their ballot is made. In several counties across the state, Democrats have filed challenges to election board decisions rejecting provisional ballots cast by voters who could not verify them in the voter registration system.
“No one is trying to count votes of people who are not registered. This is categorically false,” Adam Bonin, an attorney working on behalf of the Casey campaign, said Thursday. “This is a blatant attempt by the Republican Party to lie and distract from their efforts to disenfranchise Pennsylvanians by throwing out votes from registered voters.”
The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit Thursday against all 67 county boards of elections, claiming at least three counties have openly defied state Supreme Court decisions by counting ballots with missing or incorrect dates on the outer envelopes. The lawsuit seeks an injunction to prevent the undated ballots from being included in the final vote count.
RNC sues to keep undated mail-in ballots out of county election results as Senate race continues
McCormick’s attorneys have 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 ballots, in violation of their own counsel. “The board’s decision is legally incorrect because undated or misdated ballots are legally invalid and cannot be counted in the 2024 general election – as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has already made clear,” the lawsuit states.
On Friday in Philadelphia a The Common Pleas Court judge rejected McCormick’s request to increase the number of GOP observers counting provisional ballots. McCormick withdrew a second lawsuit seeking a “global challenge” to provisional ballots.
His advisers said on the call with reporters that their legal filings were intended to provide more transparency in 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 four hands behind our backs, right?” Harris said.
Fitzpatrick added that the campaign was not suggesting there was an attempt to purposely disregard ballots, but said human error sometimes occurs, “and that’s why spectators are allowed to watch” the counting of provisional ballots .
“While McCormick and his allies work to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters and spread disinformation, we are working to ensure Pennsylvanians’ voices are heard,” Tiernan Donohue, Casey’s campaign manager, said in a statement.
Kathy Boockvar, president of Athena Strategies and former secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, said Thursday that the lawsuit in Pennsylvania is continuing as required, and that comparisons between what the Casey campaign did and Republicans’ efforts to overturn the results of the election of 2020 were not valid.
“We have a state statute that specifically says if a race falls within 0.5%, there’s an automatic statewide recount, right? That is a state law that is codified into law and has been in place for 20 years,” she said. “And so he literally allows the state process to happen.”
What Republicans did in the last presidential election, she added, was refuse to recognize 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 a lot of other things, because people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or the Decision Desk calls an election, that that has no official relevance.” has. and it doesn’t have one,” she said. “The Associated Press and others who ‘call’ elections exist solely for the purpose of satisfying people’s need for quick answers to a process that, for good reason, is not designed to be quick.”
Pennsylvania and other states are waiting nearly three weeks after the election for results to be announced, she added. “And there’s a good reason for that. We want accuracy above all else.”
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