HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate election between incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and Republican David McCormick is headed for a statewide recount as counties continued sifting through outstanding ballots on Wednesday and the campaigns were jousting over which ones should count.
The Associated Press called the race for McCormick last week, concluding that there were not enough ballots left to count in the areas Casey was winning to put him in the lead.
An afternoon deadline passed Wednesday for Casey to waive his right to a statewide recount. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s top election official, Republican Secretary of State Al Schmidt, announced that preliminary results had triggered a legally mandated statewide recount.
As of Wednesday, McCormick led by about 28,000 votes out of more than 6.9 million ballots counted — within the 0.5% margin threshold to trigger an automatic statewide recount under Pennsylvania law.
Counties must begin the recount no later than November 20 and complete it by noon on November 26. It largely involves passing paper ballots through high-speed scanners, a process that former election officials say may not change the outcome by more than a few percent. a hundred votes.
“It’s an infinitesimally small number compared to the total number of votes,” said Jeff Greenberg, former Mercer County elections director.
Meanwhile, McCormick was in Washington this week, attending Senate orientation and caucus meetings to elect a new leader after Republicans won control of the US Senate in last week’s elections that left Donald Trump in the White House House won.
Casey has not conceded, and as Republicans pressured him on social media, his campaign manager said in a statement Wednesday that “McCormick and his allies are trying to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters.”
Adam Bonin, an attorney representing the Casey campaign in Philadelphia, said Republicans aggressively and systematically challenged the provisional ballots of registered Democrats, delaying the counting of votes.
“What we are seeing this year is more organized, more disciplined, more focused and more comprehensive than what we saw in 2020,” Bonin said.
McCormick’s campaign adviser, Mark Harris, said large Democratic-controlled counties are delaying the process by not adding the results of processed ballots to vote totals.
The McCormick campaign challenged provisional ballots that are legally allowed to be challenged, Harris said.
“This is clearly an attempt to use the law to take away our advantage,” Harris said. “This isn’t going to work. Dave McCormick is the Senator-elect and will be the Senator.”
Counties, meanwhile, were busy Wednesday processing tens of thousands of provisional ballots and hearing challenges against some of them from attorneys for Casey, McCormick and the state parties. A provisional ballot is typically cast at a polling place on Election Day and is separated from regular ballots in cases where election workers need more time to determine a voter’s eligibility to vote.
Litigation is possible. For example, Bucks County’s Democratic-majority Board of Elections voted to count more than 400 mail-in ballots that are missing the correct handwritten date on the outer envelope — something Republicans object to and have repeatedly challenged in court resists.
Bucks County’s decision is in line with several state and federal court decisions that have found it unconstitutional or illegal to throw out such ballots. But higher courts — including the state Supreme Court, most recently on Nov. 1 — have blocked those decisions, with lawsuits still pending.
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