PHILADELPHIA — The recount isn’t saving David McCormick.
At least not by itself.
Days of work reviewing and retabulating votes in Pennsylvania’s incredibly tight Republican Senate primary have produced little change in the tally, leaving Mehmet Oz with a lead that’s virtually unchanged from when the process began — and McCormick with an increasingly narrow path to victory.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has been tracking the recount across the state, tallying the initial and final numbers. And as more and more of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties complete the recount, they’re reporting numbers that are only very slightly different, if at all, from the original results.
Unless the remaining counties somehow show significant shifts — which there’s no reason to expect — McCormick appears almost certain to finish behind. His prospects would then hinge on a complex combination of legal maneuvers, likely requiring several moves to all come through in his favor.
With the election so close — Oz is up by fewer than 1,000 votes, or one-tenth of one-percentage point — it’s possible McCormick can still pull out a victory.
But he’s running out of runway.
“In a pure recount of a race of this size, I would expect the margin to change no more than 100 votes — and that’s at most,” said Derek T. Muller, an election law expert at the University of Iowa. “There’s just not a lot of wiggle room.”
McCormick is also relying on legal action, technical challenges to throw out or count certain votes, and a possible hand recount the campaign has sought in court. It hopes that hand recount would show indications of abnormalities that so far haven’t been evident, and potentially lead to even more hand recounts.
A McCormick campaign official acknowledged Thursday that the former hedge fund CEO will likely need to prevail in several of those efforts to have a chance. McCormick did get some of the incremental help he’s hoping for late Thursday, when the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ordered the counting of undated mail ballots that previously would have been rejected.
“It doesn’t take much of a path,” said the McCormick official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments and strategy.
The official emphasized that it wouldn’t take a huge shift for McCormick to overtake Oz, the celebrity doctor known as “Dr. Oz.” But they also conceded that the campaign will almost certainly not lead after the recount, and would have to prevail in many of its pending legal maneuvers.
“You’ve got to win more than you lose,” the official said.
On Friday, McCormick’s campaign invited supporters to a “Recount Party” in Pittsburgh.
McCormick’s shrinking hopes aren’t just reflected in the data. They’re also evident in the campaign’s shifting public posture. Gone are confident predictions that he would win — including projections that he would emerge as the winner within days of the May 17 primary.
Many of his team’s initial hopes have fallen by the wayside.
A prediction that mail ballots would put McCormick over the top proved unfounded, because there were far fewer than the campaign estimated. A hope that military ballots would make a big difference didn’t pan out. And it turned out there were only about 800 undated Republican mail ballots.
Some of the early optimism may have come from misreading the data. For example, many people far overestimated how many mail ballots were left to be counted after primary day by relying on incomplete data. Nor was it ever likely there would be a large enough number of military ballots.
And on Thursday, the McCormick campaign official said the recount was producing large changes in results — but that assertion was based on incomplete numbers from eight days prior. So while the campaign calculated it had picked up dozens of votes in Philadelphia, it had actually lost two, and Oz had gained one.
Most counties have actually found that their initial vote counts were almost spot-on, with tallies shifting by two or three votes per county, out of thousands cast.
Delaware County, one of the 10 largest for Republican votes, added two Oz votes and five for McCormick, a net gain of three for McCormick. Cumberland County, also in the top 10, added one vote for Oz and two for McCormick. In Somerset County, a rare example so far of a double-digit change, McCormick picked up 14 votes in the recount — but Oz picked up 11. That’s nowhere near what McCormick needs to win the recount.
“McCormick was supposed to pick up supposedly hundreds of votes in some of these precincts,” said U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., an Oz supporter.
Slight changes during recounts are normal — and part of the reason for automatic recounts such as this one, triggered by state law when the margin of victory is within 0.5% of the vote. During a recount, a small number of votes that were previously read by a machine are instead reviewed manually. All recount numbers are unofficial and subject to change by the state’s certification deadline of noon on Wednesday.
The Oz campaign has mostly appeared content to play defense, confident that the original numbers will hold up.
“The Dr. Oz campaign continues to be highly confident that they received the most votes and the recount will demonstrate that, just like the initial count did,” Oz spokesperson Brittany Yanick said.
McCormick’s camp declined to comment on the record, but argued that the recount could still narrow the gap. The campaign is pursuing several concurrent efforts to make up any remaining shortfall.
In Berks County, it’s challenging dozens of provisional votes cast during a court-ordered, hour-long extension of election day voting due to malfunctioning electronic poll books in some precincts.
And while the Commonwealth Court ruled in McCormick’s favor to include undated mail ballots — those that arrived on time but would previously have been rejected because they were missing the required handwritten date on their outer envelope — it’s unlikely the roughly 800 undated Republican mail ballots at issue would deliver McCormick more than a few dozen net votes, given the overall patterns.
McCormick has outpaced Oz in votes cast by mail. But a significant portion of mail ballots — about 45% of those counted — have gone to candidates besides him. For example, undated ballots in Delaware County would give three more votes to McCormick — but also two to Oz. Philadelphia’s undated ballots gave McCormick 22 more votes, but 24 for Oz.
McCormick’s newer legal challenge — a suit seeking a hand recount of ballots in 150 precincts across 12 counties — is also unlikely to deliver seismic shifts.
The campaign says it’s targeting precincts where voting patterns are out of line with what it believes are historical norms. It singled out counties where the number of GOP votes cast in the gubernatorial primary and the Senate race vary significantly from one another. Such “undervotes” or “overvotes” are common — it’s not unusual for someone to vote in just one race and skip other contests.
Elections officials in several of the targeted counties said they were confused by the precincts the campaign chose. There’s nothing unusual going on, they said, and the recount so far has affirmed that. One county official talked with poll workers in the relevant precincts and examined the results after the lawsuit was filed, and came up empty.
“This hand recount thing, they’re going off of what? Data?” the county official said. “There’s nothing wrong, they’re all spot-on.”
The McCormick campaign has provided few details about the data behind its hand recount request. And since the ongoing recount has so far almost entirely affirmed the initial count, it’s far from certain that a hand recount would find anything significantly different. Machine scans flag ballots with “undervotes” or “overvotes” and election administrators have already inspected those ballots manually.
“I’m very skeptical that a hand recount of those precincts is going to change anything,” said Muller, the University of Iowa expert. “Optical scan systems these days are extremely good at their jobs.”
The Commonwealth Court has scheduled a Monday hearing to consider the hand recount request. Should the McCormick camp prevail and those recounts shift the margins in the first 150 precincts, campaign officials say they hope to expand their scope to potentially more than 1,000 precincts statewide.
That would likely require a court to not only approve an expanded request for hand recounts, but also push back the Wednesday deadline for certifying a winner.
McCormick’s campaign hasn’t cast aspersions on the election, but it contends there are legal votes that should still be counted. .
“What we’re really looking for is our confidence that every vote has been counted,” the McCormick campaign official said. “Once we have confidence that every vote has been counted and every properly cast vote has been counted, then we’ll have a lot more confidence in the results.”
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