Most Pennsylvania counties were done or almost done with the U.S. Senate recount by the time incumbent Democrat Bob Casey conceded to incoming Republican Dave McCormick on Thursday evening.
And when the Department of State told counties to stop work on the recount Friday morning, election officials across the state were finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Elections offices have been working non-stop since September and will finally put the 2024 election in the rear view mirror with Monday’s certification deadline.
Lebanon County’s election director Sean Drasher says he and his staff put in 90 hours of overtime in multiple two-week pay periods.
“We’ve never had anything like anything even close to this. There’s nothing even to compare it to, with that many hours going in.”
Every presidential election pushes counties’ elections staff to exhaustion, but interest in the state’s version of early voting option added even more to the workload.
In many counties across the state, voters lined up to request, fill out, and return on-the-spot by-mail ballots, an approach not seen in large numbers in previous elections.
“Everyone knew it was coming, and even though we all knew it was coming, it still hit us like a truck.”
Now, counties are submitting their final, certified election results to the state and wrapping up a few additional reports.
Many counties, like Columbia and York, have already finalized, audited and reported their vote totals.
Election officials also have to finalize voter history, precinct-level vote totals, and a few other reports before starting in December to prepare for next year’s judicial retention and municipal elections.
Electoral votes will be cast on Dec. 17, new state and federal legislators will be sworn into office in early January, and President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.
Recount canceled
Twenty-one counties had finished and reported their recount numbers for U.S. Senate by Thursday night.
Several others, like Columbia, Lebanon, Perry, Schuylkill and York had finished the work but not yet submitted their official numbers to the state. Others still, like Cumberland County, said they were all but done.
Per state law, the state reimburses counties for costs incurred to conduct the recount.
The Department of State told election directors it still expects to pay recount-related costs even with the cancellation, according to Perry County Election Director Sarah Geesaman. The formal paperwork for the reimbursements have not yet been shared, she said.
The counties that already submitted their recount numbers will use those as the final, official vote totals, while other counties will use the numbers they had before the recount, according to multiple county election directors.
The differences between the pre- and post-recount numbers are marginal. Perry County had no change in results. In Columbia County, Casey gained 90 votes in the recount to McCormick’s 70, a consequence of finding additional marks on ballots that machines didn’t read the first time through. Those include check marks or other ways of filling out a ballot that aren’t always detected by machines, according to election director Matthew Repasky.
In the end, McCormick beat Casey by less than a quarter of one percent of the vote, a margin of 16,000 votes out of seven million votes cast.
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