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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