HARISBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) – A senior Pennsylvania election official said Wednesday that the gap between the first two Republican Senate candidates last week was small enough to trigger a nationwide recount. June while the candidates fight in court.
Acting Secretary of State Lee Chapman said the difference in the total number of votes for the first two graduates – renowned cardiac surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz and former hedge fund chief executive David McCormick – falls within the scope of state census legislation.
Oz, backed by former President Donald Trump, led McCormick by 902 votes, or 0.07 percentage points, from 1,343,643 ballots counted by the state on Wednesday.
One of the questions about McCormick’s campaign is whether there are enough unpaid ballots to make up for the difference with Oz.
The State Department estimates that the counties have about 10,000 temporary and absentee ballots that remain to be counted, but does not know how many were cast by Republican voters.
There are another 860 Republican ballots to be sent by mail without handwritten dates on their envelopes, which are the subject of lawsuits, department officials said.
When recounting, most ballots are simply re-scanned electronically. Voter workers check ballots by hand if the scanner has not registered a vote or rejected it as a double vote, and may find more voters there, election lawyers say.
The biggest change in votes could come from finding a data entry error, a human error – such as transposed numbers when calculating voting data – that could go both ways, they say.
According to the Pennsylvania Census Act, the division between the candidates must be within the law within 0.5%. The Associated Press will not announce a winner until the countdown is over. This may take until June 8.
The winner will face Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Feterman in the November by-elections, which Democrats say is their best chance to take a seat in the narrowly divided Senate. The current president, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, is stepping down after two terms.
The deadline for counties to report their unofficial results to the state election service was Tuesday. However, counties continued to count thousands of ballots on Wednesday, including temporary, military and foreign absentee ballots.
Chapman’s recount order is mandatory – unless the losing candidate requests that it not be complied with. McCormick had no plans to refuse a recount, saying in a statement that “we look forward to a quick solution so that our party can unite and win” Feterman in the fall.
The counties will begin the countdown next week and have until June 7 to end another day to report the state’s results.
In these cases, McCormick hopes to get help in bridging the gap with Oz.
His campaign asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to force counties to count those ballots immediately. The lower court ordered a hearing next Tuesday on the issue.
Oz, the Republican National Committee and the US Republican Party oppose McCormick’s request. A separate case involving these same ballots could go to the US Supreme Court.
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Follow Mark Levy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/timelywriter.
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