The official recount in the race for the U.S. Senate between Sen. Bob Casey and his Republican challenger Dave McCormick got underway in Allegheny County on Wednesday.
A recount is required by law in Pennsylvania when the margin between candidates is less than 0.5%. As of Wednesday morning, McCormick led by 0.24%, or more than 16,500 votes.
Past recounts in the commonwealth have typically at most shifted hundreds of votes, not thousands. And Casey still hasn’t conceded, saying that he will wait for the results of the recount. “Pennsylvanians deserve to have their voices heard, and the worth of someone’s vote is not determined by how long it takes to be counted,” he said in a press release Tuesday.
About 100 county workers began the process of rescanning more than 700,000 ballots on Wednesday at 8 a.m. at the county election facility on the North Side. The process is expected to take a day or two.
The mail-in ballots were being scanned by machines that were used on election day, while election-day ballots were being scanned by machines that counted mail-in ballots during the first count. This is a requirement to prevent systematic errors by the machines, according to a spokesperson for the county.
The county allowed video cameras and photographs in the election facility because the naked ballots didn’t contain any personal information from voters. During election day, media was only allowed to photograph the facility’s video monitors.
Lawyers for both Casey and McCormick were huddled around a table in the middle of the recount process, looking over specific envelopes and signatures. They asked that media not listen in on their conversations, and the county was unable to verify what the two parties were speaking about. So it was unclear if there were any additional ballots that might still be added to the county’s totals.
Allegheny County’s vote-certification process has gone relatively smoothly, with general agreement about which provisional ballots to count and which ones are challengeable. The one major category of ballots the board of elections didn’t have unanimous consent on was whether to count provisional ballots where voters had signed the ballot in only one spot rather than two. Both Democrats supported including those ballots, while Republican Sam DeMarco voted against.
Republican billionaire Elon Musk shared misinformation about whether Casey’s campaign was pushing to include non-citizen votes. Casey has said repeatedly he is pushing to include every legal voter and, as part of that process, they have been investigating provisional ballots that were disallowed because a voter was not registered. In a handful of cases they have found mistakes when a voter was mistakenly identified as unregistered.
At least four other Pennsylvania counties received criticism from Republicans for trying to include the votes of mail-in voters who didn’t put the correct date on their ballot envelopes. Philadelphia, Montgomery, Bucks and and Centre counties all voted to include those ballots, despite the most recent court rulings disallowing such votes.
Election officials in those counties argued that the ballots were received on time, and a mistaken date shouldn’t be a reason to disallow their ballots. McCormick’s campaign sued and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed with McCormick, reaffirming that counties should not count those votes at least in this election during a ruling on Monday.
"No more excuses," Michael Whatley, the RNC's chair, said in a post on X after the court's ruling. "Election officials in Bucks, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and other counties have absolutely no choice."
Two years ago McCormick argued the opposite position — that undated ballots should be counted in a primary race that he ultimately lost to Mehmet Oz by less than 1,000 votes. McCormick conceded during the recount process. Oz, who eventually lost in the general election to Sen. John Fetterman, was nominated on Tuesday by president-elect Donald Trump to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
A spokesperson for McCormick didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The final results of the recount are expected on Nov. 27.
