The U.S. Senate race is going to an automatic recount, requiring already exhausted election officials to reprocess seven million ballots in under two weeks.
Republican candidate Dave McCormick leads incumbent Democrat Bob Casey by 0.43%, or 27,000 votes. The margin for recounts is 0.5%.
Counties will start their recounts as soon as they have finished the first unofficial count of ballots, according to Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State. There are about 80,000 ballots still left to be tallied across the state.
Nov. 27 is the deadline to finish the recount and certify the Senate race. Counties need to certify all other races by the 25th, per state law.
“Counties will use a different method or different equipment to tabulate votes than what they used to compile their unofficial results,” Schmidt said Thursday at a press conference in Harrisburg. “This is done to ensure any potential tabulation issues can be identified.”
The recount is expected to cost just over $1 million, Schmidt said. Counties will front the costs, then are reimbursed by the state, according to a Department of State spokesperson.
“This is the eighth recount that has been triggered in the last 20 years,” Schmidt said.
In three of those cases, the losing candidate waived a recount and conceded the race.
The Casey campaign hasn’t done that. Two years ago, McCormick went through a recount when he narrowly lost his Senate primary race to Mehmet Oz.
Statewide recounts rarely change the outcome of a race.
Many of the estimated 80,000 ballots left to be counted remain tied up in challenges and litigation. Both the McCormick and Casey campaigns have filed challenges in counties across the state seeking to have some provisional or mail-in ballots counted — or blocked.
The Republican National Committee has filed a petition directly with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to block counties from including mail-in ballots with faulty or missing dates on return envelopes.
Counties typically recount the ballots that are subject to challenges but keep them segregated, pending a final adjudication from county boards of elections or the courts.
In 2020, Pennsylvania counties set aside about 10,000 mail-in ballots that arrived at county elections offices in the three days after that year’s general election. The state Supreme Court had held that these ballots could be counted, but they were not included in final results pending a challenged field in the U.S. Supreme Court. In subsequent years, Pennsylvania courts upheld the Election Day deadline for when mail ballots must be received by counties.
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