As the state continues its legally mandated recount in Pennsylvania US Senate the race between the incumbent Democrat Bob Casey and his Republican opponent Dave McCormicka second news outlet called the race for McCormick. The recount, triggered by the vote margin, will continue, and all 67 counties will receive the results at the State Department by November 26.

Under state law, an automatic recount is triggered when the margin of victory is 0.5% or less. As of Thursday afternoon, unofficial results on the DOS website showed Casey with 48.53 percent of the vote and McCormick with 48.89 percent. The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on Nov. 7. Casey did not budge, citing the 100,000 ballots yet to be counted. Headquarters of the decision office joined the AP on Thursday projecting McCormick as the winner.

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On Thursday, Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt said just over 80,000 ballots remained as of mid-afternoon, which included 20,000 mail-in and vote-in ballots and about 60,000 mail-in ballots. provisional vote. He said once the counties complete all their ballots, county officials will immediately proceed to recount each ballot in the Senate race.

“There are nearly 7 million paper ballots that our 67 county election offices will count as they complete the process,” Schmidt said. “During the recount, counties will use a different method or different 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 give in or waive the recount by noon Wednesday. According to DOS, once the recount starts in the counties, it cannot be stopped. If Casey decided to concede before the counties began recounting, he or the campaign would have to alert DOS so the recount could be stopped, although there is very little time for that to happen. Counties must begin recounting no later than November 20.

In coverage of the 2021 Pennsylvania commonwealth court race between Drew Crompton and Lori Dumas, Crompton admitted after the recount was well underway so it went ahead as scheduled.

Schmidt estimated the cost of the recount to exceed $1 million, but the total will not be fully calculated until the results of the recount are released.

McCormick heads for the Capitol

McCormick was in Washington, DC, this week attending orientation for new senators. During a call with reporters Thursday morning, McCormick campaign advisers said that even with the endorsement, Casey has “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 on the call that there was no mathematical way for Casey to edge McCormick on the remaining ballots.

Fitzpatrick claimed the Casey campaign was advocating that unregistered voters who cast provisional ballots 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 are the ones who have to confirm whether a voter is registered or not, not taking the word of the local board of elections and the SURE system,” referring to the Uniform State Register of Voters, the system election officials use to update voter status, verify voter registration and track mail ballots.

“Everybody knows that the electoral boards and the SURE system are the arbiters of who is registered and who is not,” Fitzpatrick added, and said any attempt to legitimize the counting of votes from unregistered voters “will be met with litigation.”

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who supported President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign by offering 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 they were “openly committing crimes now”.

State law includes an appeals process that allows for a review of provisional ballots to confirm whether a voter is registered before a final ballot decision is made. In several counties across the state, Democrats filed appeals of board of elections decisions to reject provisional ballots cast by voters they could not verify in the voter registration system.

“No one is trying to count the votes of people who are not registered. This is flat out false,” Adam Bonin, an attorney working on behalf of the Casey campaign, said Thursday. “This is a blatant attempt by the GOP to lie and distract from their efforts to disenfranchise other Pennsylvanians by removing votes from registered voters.”

The GOP filed a series of lawsuits to stop the vote counting

The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit Thursday against all 67 county boards of elections, alleging that at least three counties openly defied Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings by counting ballots with missing or incorrect data on the outer envelopes. The lawsuit seeks an order to prevent undated ballots from being included in the final vote count.

McCormick’s attorneys filed a similar lawsuit in Bucks County, alleging that Democrats on that county’s board of elections voted Nov. 12 to count 405 undated and expired mail-in ballots against their own attorney. “The board’s decision is legally flawed because undated or undated postal ballots are legally invalid and cannot be counted in the 2024 general election – as the Supreme Court has already stated in Pennsylvania,” the suit argues.

On Friday in Philadelphia, a Common Pleas Court judge denied McCormick’s request to increase the number of GOP observers counting provisional ballots. McCormick withdrew a second lawsuit seeking a “global challenge” to the provisional ballots.

His advisers said on the call with reporters that their legal filings were intended to provide increased transparency in the process, but that they did not indicate a lack of confidence in McCormick’s victory.

“Just because we think 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 is not suggesting there was an effort to intentionally reduce ballots, but said human error sometimes occurs, “and that’s why observers are allowed to watch” the counting of provisional ballots.

“As McCormick and his allies work to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters and spread misinformation, we strive to ensure that the voices of Pennsylvanians are heard,” Casey campaign manager Tiernan Donohue said in a statement.

Kathy Boockvar, president of Athena Strategies and former Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth, said Thursday that the Pennsylvania process is moving forward as needed, and comparisons between what Casey’s campaign was doing and Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 election results are not valid. .

“We have a state statute that specifically says, if a race falls within 0.5 percent, there’s an automatic statewide recount, right? This is a state law enshrined by statute that has been in place for 20 years,” she said. “And so he’s literally allowing the state trial to happen.”

What Republicans did during the last presidential election cycle, she added, was to refuse to recognize the results after the election had already been certified.

Boockvar said the practice of “calling” an election has “done more damage to the perception of the election than a lot of other things, because people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or the Decision Bureau calls an election, that has some official relevance, and it doesn’t he has none,” she said. “The Associated Press and others ‘calling’ elections exist only to feed people’s need for quick answers to a process that is not designed to be quick for good reason.”

Pennsylvania and other states allow nearly three weeks after the election until the results are certified, she added. “And there’s a good reason for that. We want precision more than anything else.”

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. The Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains its editorial independence. Contact editor Kim Lyons with questions: [email protected]. Follow the Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.