PHILADELPHIA — Dave McCormick’s campaign plans to ask the Commonwealth Court for a hand recount of Republican Senate primary votes in specific precincts in 12 Pennsylvania counties, they told reporters Tuesday, as the campaign raised questions about the accuracy of the vote count.
The campaign pointed to discrepancies between vote tallies listed on county websites and those reported by the Department of State, and said there are still questions about how many outstanding ballots remain to be counted, even as a statewide recount has begun.
“I can’t tell you today with full confidence — I can’t tell my client how many votes we have,” a McCormick campaign official told reporters, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We’re doing a recount of the count that I actually don’t know the results of.”
There’s no evidence of fraud in the count, and the campaign didn’t allege any. Discrepancies in the public tallies may result from several reasons, including counties updating their websites at different times than they update the state.
The call for a hand recount comes as an initial count showed Mehmet Oz with just under 1,000 more votes than McCormick out of more than 1.3 million cast. The narrow margin has triggered an automatic recount, under state law, to verify the winner.
“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 McCormick aide said.
McCormick’s camp said it would request a hand recount in precincts where it believes there are abnormalities, such as large discrepancies between the number of votes cast in the GOP gubernatorial and Senate primaries. It would run concurrently with the statewide recount, the campaign said.
The campaign is initially requesting a hand recount in precincts in Allegheny, York, Centre, Chester, Cumberland, Erie, Lancaster, Monroe, Schuylkill, Delaware, Bucks and Westmoreland counties.
“We understand that this process has already gone on too long — we’re all ready for it to be over with,” the official said. “It’s just the transparency — there’s an enormous lack of it.”
Meanwhile, the Oz campaign is taking its case over undated mail ballots to Washington.
In a legal filing over the weekend before the U.S. Supreme Court, the campaign has urged Justice Samuel Alito to issue an emergency stay on a recent federal appellate court ruling that found that the state’s current practice of rejecting ballots that arrive on time but are missing the required handwritten date on the outer envelope is arbitrary and has no bearing on whether the votes were cast by an eligible voter.
In that case — which involved a 2021 judicial race in Lehigh County — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled such undated ballots should be counted.
Neither Oz nor McCormick was a party to that original case. But the decision has since become an issue in the close contest between them.
McCormick argues they should be counted in their race, too.
Oz disagrees. In his campaign’s filing, his attorneys called the 3rd Circuit ruling “thinly reasoned and erroneous” and accused McCormick of “weaponizing (it) to undermine the apparent result” of their race in a “broader effort to thwart the apparent will of Pennsylvania’s voters.”
“This is no way to run an election,” wrote John M. Gore, an attorney with the Washington D.C.-based law firm Jones Day which is representing the Oz campaign. “The (Supreme) Court should safeguard the integrity of Pennsylvania’s elections and stay the 3rd Circuit’s order.”
The Oz camp rests its argument on two main points: Pennsylvania law and prior state court decisions were clear in saying that undated ballots should be rejected and even if the federal courts were to overturn those rules, changing them mid-election would erode public trust in the results.
Changing the rules about which votes will be counted while the counting is still ongoing threatens, Gore wrote, to “undercut the finality vital to a functioning democracy because (it) encourage(s) losing candidates to invoke the judicial process ‘to undo the ballot result.’
State elections officials have estimated there are more than 800 undated mail ballots at issue statewide.
But whatever the courts decide could have a significant impact in future elections, deciding whether hundreds or potentially thousands of voters have their ballots counted or rejected based on a mistake they made while filling out their ballots.
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