PA GOP Senate Primary Candidate McCormick Wants Ballots Recounted by Hand in 12 Counties
But SCOTUS “paused the counting of some mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.”
After two weeks, we do not know who won the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary race. Save McCormick trails Mehmet Oz by 900 votes.
Last week, state officials triggered a recount since Oz only leads by 0.5%. A few counties started “the mandated machine recount.” Today is the deadline to start the recount.
The counties have until noon on June 7 to complete the recount and give the state the results.
The McCormick campaign wants the counties to recount the ballots by hand. From Fox News:
But the McCormick senior campaign official lamented, “We’re doing a recount of a count that I actually don’t know the results of… We have essentially two different sources of data. One being the counties. Two being the Department of State, with completely different [results].”
The official said, “We’re going to ask today for a hand recount of 12 different counties to get a complete sense of the delta between what the counties are providing our campaign and what the Department of State [is providing]… We have between 15-20 thousand vote discrepancy between the ballots cast and the ballots counted.”
“We’re going to understand with a hand recount where any abnormalities exist and actually have a receipt that we can trust and verify,” the official emphasized.
The McCormick campaign wants the hand recount in the counties Allegheny, York, Centre, Chester, Cumberland, Erie, Lancaster, Monroe, Schuykill, Delaware, Bucks, and Westmoreland.
The official said, “the undervote falls outside the norm” in those 12 counties. An undervote is “a ballot not counted because of unclear marking by the voter.”
Here’s where it gets sticky.
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit decided that state election officials must “count the mail-in ballots that arrived on time but lacked a handwritten date.”
McCormick made the lower court’s ruling his main argument to hand count those ballots without dates. Oz objected because “state law precludes them from being tallied.”
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court refused “to exercise its ‘King’s Bench Powers’ to hear the case directly.” Therefore, McCormick must take his case through the lower court system.
On Tuesday, the attorneys for McCormick and Oz argued their cases in front of Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer. She gave the impression throughout the arguments the state should count the ballots:
“Have you ever made a mistake when you put a date on something?” she asked Oz’s attorneys. “I know I have. … Should that defeat a person’s ability to vote?”
But all of the progress made so far might be moot after SCOTUS “paused the counting of some mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.”
Justice Samuel Alito made the order, issuing “a brief administrative stay, allowing the court additional time to consider more formal action in the case.”
It’s June 1. The election is in November. I understand the law and the importance of having votes count. But the Senate is 50-50, not counting Vice President Kamala Harris. McCormick and Oz want to replace retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey.
Considering Pennsylvania can swing either way, the state needs to figure this out as soon as possible.
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In NY that kind of demands got the judge to order all ballots be recounted so the same initial winner was still the winner.
Hope McCormick loses. He is fully into woke capital (he said so himself). We know 100% he is lying to us, while small as it is there is a chance Oz actually did change all of his opinions as he claims.
I do not think Oz is a good candidate. at all. But this recount and recount and recount over handwritten dates….
I suggest that we do what we required of Afghanistan when we first went in. One day of voting, and you stain your finger purple to prove that you voted. Period. Anyone who cannot get into a voting station doesn’t want to vote badly enough. And fine, declare it a national holiday or mandate that workers only work 6 hours that day to make sure everyone can do so.
Going further:
Election Day a holiday.
All polls open the same time Zulu. No time zone adjustments. Make the polling 24 hours. No one has an excuse to miss out.
By all polls closing at the same time, no “calling”!some eastern state with 1% of the vote counted.
24 hours to count ballots. Period. No “look what we found!”
Going even further:
Paper ballots, preserved forever.
All ballots are counted at the precincts by the precinct workers at the end of the vote. Feed them into ballot counting machines that are not connected to the internet. Adjudicate unclear ballots on the spot.
Campaigns can have observers to watch the counting. In ‘high-risk’ districts a federal observer can be present.
I recently served as an Election Clerk in the Texas Election (Amendments, Bonds and local offices). While I know large counties (Dallas, Harris, Bexar, etc.) use different voting machines, I also know that Texas refused adoption of Dominion machines.
In our half-rural county we used machines which are touch screen and produce a human readable completed ballot. That ballot is fed into a reader which keeps the ballots in a locked area of the machine. At the end of the election, the ballot box is removed with witnesses, locked, security cabled and then transported to the County Election Coordinator’s Office to be impounded. A tape of the machine’s results is also produced with vote tally and taken to the same office.
The only “mail in” ballots allowed in Texas are “Absentee Ballots” and the ballot must be requested by date certain with the form signed, dated and ID provided. Only those who are too ill to get to the polls, will be absent from the county on election day (including military) and 65 and older qualify for Absentee voting. I’ve been qualified for the latter for over a decade and have never voted absentee in that time. I’d do away with that reason for Absentee Voting.
I’ve said this myself many times. Nobody gives a crap about Labor Day anyway, it’s not actually celebrating anything, remove that and make the holiday Election Day instead.
The unions would have a conniption fit. Labor Day is “their” holiday. They spent lots and lots of cash with Democrats to get that holiday approved and they won’t give it up easily.
Better if we don’t have another Muslim in Congress.
I believe he Carrie’s dual citizenship as well. No, thanks.
Honestly this isn’t hard. The State Legislature passed a statute that requires a date be put on it to be considered valid. That is the current law. It isn’t ambiguous. Those ballots lacking the required elements to meet the statute should be tossed. Substituting the CT for the legislature is a bad idea. Eventually the legislature may decide to substitute itself for the CT, then what?
The Judge is, IMO, talking out her ass. If an attorney submitted a filing past her deadline would she accept it? Does she even have leeway to do so? If the Judge writes a post dated check will the bank cash it or reject it? Dates on official documents are the standard, including quasi official documents like checks and contracts.
“Have you ever made a mistake when you put a date on something?” she asked Oz’s attorneys. “I know I have. … Should that defeat a person’s ability to vote?”
Such a mistake routinely invalidates any personal or commercial contract; poisons criminal prosecutions; and subjects taxpayers to audits, fines, and penalties from the IRS… so I believe the clear and obvious answer is, “HELL, YES!”
I hear “conservatives” saying that President Trump should give up his mantra about the election being stolen. Why should he, or any of us with this going on in Pennsylvania once again? What part of “Election Day” or as the Constitution states, “first Tuesday after the first Monday” is difficult to understand? What we are witnessing in Pennsylvania definitely keeps the stolen election argument alive.
Which constitution says anything about “election day”, let alone “first Tuesday after the first Monday”? Certainly not the US constitution.
As far as presidential elections are concerned the constitution says nothing at all about general elections; it’s entirely up to each state’s legislature to decide how that state’s electors are chosen, so there doesn’t even have be an election, let alone on a specific day. The only “election day” for president is when the electors meet, and that date is set by congress, not by the constitution.
In addition, even if there were a rule that elections have to be held on one day, it would still take time to count the ballots, and recount them if it’s close, and there would still be provision for postal ballots, and therefore time to wait for them, and disputes about which flaws are fatal and which can be cured or overlooked.
So I misspoke. I will give you this. Let me say it more succinctly. I am tired of Americans needing their ass wiped to learn how to vote. If you cannot read a ballot and put a date adjacent to your signature then don’t fucking vote!
Racist !!1!!!11!!!!!
The beauty of this particular brouhaha is that it exposes all the flaws and illegalities of the Pennsylvania election process, while simultaneously not involving a single Democrat or Democrat lawyer… so Democrats have no choice but to STFU about the process, including whatever corruption gets found as a result.
You know it’s bad when the elections officials can’t even tell you how many votes have been counted. That’s literally adding together all of the vote totals. Not to mention that they’re STILL doing no-excuse absentee ballots (mail-in) even though they are not allowed under the voting laws in Pennsylvania, and they won’t be until they go through the entire process and amend the State constitution which also includes an state-wide referendum. This is the 2nd election that they’ve been using the same laws that were improperly passed.
“Have you ever arrived someplace late and it was closed? I have, why should that defeat a person’s ability to vote just because the polls closed.”
Mail-in ballots is the destruction of a republic, the potential for fraud is limitless, That is why no country on earth used them prior to 2020.
That’s not true. Many countries have postal ballots, and have done for at least many decades. (If you mean mailing out ballots to people who haven’t even applied for one, just because they’re on record as having voted last time, that’s a whole lot less common, but it doesn’t happen in Pennsylvania, so it’s irrelevant.)
It is true that postal ballots are notorious for the opportunity they present for fraud, and that is a good reason to make the rules for them tighter, not looser, and to apply the rules strictly. It should be eliminated to the greatest extent possible.
I never supported Dr.Oz, but if McCormick succeeds in having undated/invalid ballots counted, it will be repeated in November and all succeeding elections, allowing for a greater opportunity of fraud. The law is clear; if you can’t follow the law, your vote ought not count.
The law is invalid because it was passed without going through the Commonwealth’s Constitutionally mandated method of passing election law, as Ironclaw points out.
The ballots aren’t “undated” (not to mention the issue is the ballot envelope. The USPS postmarked the ballot envelope and the county election office date/time stamped the envelope when it was received. What is missing is the voter’s handwritten date next to his signature on the outside of the ballot envelope that is otherwise double dated. Some counties removed the ballots from these envelopes without handwritten date and counted the ballot therein. It is not possible now to remove those ballots from the vote count. Other counties did not count these ballots, so some voters who failed to date their signature had their votes counted while others did not. This has raised Equal Protection issues under the 14th Amendment for McCormick.
If you believe it is right and proper for some ballots (votes) to be counted and other same ballots to not be counted, depending on the county in doing the counting, say so.
Election month is getting old. Didn’t vote for either of these two, but it’s not helping the Pennsylvania GOP.
But it’s not the GOP who is on the hotseat here.
It’s the PA election officials, many of whom are Democrat stooges.
The Legislature makes the laws not the Judicial branch. This judge has no reason to be hearing this in the first case unless the law itself is being challenged as Unconstitutional. We have seen unelected bureaucrats and Judges in PA do this nonsense. The Legislature needs to act and remove these Judges and bureaucrats that overstep their bounds
Except the Legislature failed hugely in passing a bill in an unconstitutional manner. As the unconstitutional bill benefited Democrats, of course Wolf signed it.
The Commonwealth’s Constitution was not followed in changing PA election law with the Wuhan ChiCom Flu being the excuse for illegally changing the law. IOW in 2020 the Republican Legislature was buffaloed by the Dems and St, Fauci into an illegal act benefiting the Democrats.