Pennsylvania prepares for a recount as Casey and McCormick campaigns focus on ballots

Dave McCormick walks through the U.S. Capitol building as reporters ask him questions on Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024. (Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)

As the state proceeded Thursday with the legally required recount in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race between incumbent Bob Casey and his GOP opponent Dave McCormick, a second news outlet called the race for McCormick. But it appears the recount, triggered by the vote margin will continue, with all 67 counties expected to have their results to the Department of State (DOS) by Nov. 26. 

The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on Nov. 7, but Casey did not concede, citing the 100,000 ballots still to be counted. Decision Desk HQ joined the AP Thursday projecting McCormick as the winner. 

Under state law, an automatic recount is triggered when the margin of victory is 0.5% or less. As of Thursday afternoon, the DOS website’s unofficial results showed Casey with 48.53% of votes and McCormick with 48.89%. 

Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said Thursday that as of Wednesday afternoon just over 80,000 ballots remained to be counted, which included 20,000 mail-in and absentee ballots and approximately 60,000 provisional ballots. He said once counties complete their canvass of all ballots, county officials will then immediately move on to recounting every ballot cast in the Senate race. 

“That’s nearly 7 million paper ballots that our 67 county election offices will recount 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 any potential tabulation issues can be identified.”

To halt the recount, Casey would have had to concede or waive a recount by noon Wednesday. According to DOS once the recount begins in the counties, it cannot be halted. If Casey were to decide to concede prior to the counties beginning the recount, he or the campaign would need to alert DOS so the recount could be stopped, although there is very little time for that to happen. Counties have to begin the recount no later than Nov. 20.  

In the recount of the 2021 race for Pennsylvania’s commonwealth court between Drew Crompton and Lori Dumas, Crompton conceded after the recount was well underway, so it continued on as scheduled.

Schmidt estimated the cost of the recount would exceed $1 million, but the total won’t be fully calculated by the time the results of the recount are released.

Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race between Casey and McCormick going to a recount

McCormick has been in Washington, D.C., this week participating in orientation for new senators. During a call with reporters Thursday morning, McCormick campaign advisors said even with the recount Casey had “zero chance” of winning and noted the $1 million price tag.

Mark Harris, lead strategist for the McCormick campaign, and James Fitzpatrick, counsel to the campaign, said on the call that there was no mathematical path for Casey to overtake McCormick with the remaining ballots. 

Fitzpatrick claimed the Casey campaign was advocating that unregistered voters who cast a provisional ballot should have their votes counted. “This is a totally frivolous and meritless argument,” Fitzpatrick said during the call. “The Casey campaign’s position is that they are the ones who need 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 Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, the system election officials use to update voters’ statuses, check voter registration and track mail ballots. 

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

people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or Decision Desk calls an election, that that has any official relevance, and it has none.

– Kathy Boockvar, former Pa. Secretary of the Commonwealth

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who supported President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign by giving 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 they were “flat-out openly doing crime now.”

State law includes a challenge process that allows for a review of provisional ballots, to confirm whether a voter is registered before a final determination of their ballot is made. In several counties across the state, Democrats have filed challenges to board of elections’ decisions rejecting provisional ballots cast by voters they were unable to verify in the voter registration system. 

“No one is trying to count votes from individuals who were not registered. This is categorically false,” Adam Bonin, a lawyer 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 Pennsylvanians by throwing out votes from registered voters.” 

The Republican National Committee on Thursday filed a lawsuit against all 67 county boards of elections, claiming at least three counties have openly defied the state Supreme Court’s decisions by counting ballots with missing or incorrect dates on the outer envelopes. The suit seeks an order to prevent the undated ballots from being included in final vote counts. 

RNC sues to keep undated mail ballots out of counties’ election results as Pa. Senate race drags on

 

McCormick’s attorneys filed a similar suit in Bucks County alleging that Democrats on that county’s board of elections voted Nov. 12 to count 405 undated and misdated mail ballots, going against their own counsel. “The board’s decision is legally erroneous because undated or misdated mail ballots are invalid as a matter of law and cannot be counted in the 2024 General Election — as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has already made clear,” the suit argues.

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

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

“Just because we believe we’re going to win doesn’t mean we are going to tie four hands behind our back, right?” Harris said. 

Fitzpatrick added that the campaign was not suggesting there was an effort to purposely discount ballots, but said that human error sometimes occurs, “and that’s the reason why watchers are permitted to watch” the counting of provisional ballots.

“While McCormick and his allies are working to disenfranchise voters in Pennsylvania and spread misinformation, we are working to ensure that Pennsylvanians’ voices are heard,” Tiernan Donohue, Casey campaign manager said in a statement. 

Kathy Boockvar, president of Athena Strategies and former Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth said Thursday that Pennsylvania’s process was moving ahead as required, and comparisons between what the Casey campaign was doing and Republicans’ efforts to overturn results in the 2020 election were not valid. 

“We’ve got a state statute that specifically says if a race is within 0.5% there is an automatic statewide recount, right? That is a state law enshrined by statute that has been around for 20 years,” she said. “And so he is literally just allowing the state process to happen.”

What Republicans did during the last presidential election cycle, she added, was refuse to acknowledge the results after the elections were already certified.

Boockvar said the practice of “calling” elections has “done more damage to perceptions of elections than a lot of other things, because people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or Decision Desk calls an election, that that has any official relevance, and it has none,” she said. “The Associated Press and others ‘calling’ of elections exist solely for the purpose of feeding people’s need for quick answers to a process that is not designed to be quick for good reasons.”

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

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