HARRISBURG, Pa. — The automatic ballot recount triggered by a razor-thin margin between Senate candidates Mehmet Oz and David McCormick began Tuesday in Pennsylvania.
In South Central Pennsylvania, Cumberland, Lancaster, Perry and York Counties began their recounts Tuesday, with Adams, Franklin, Juniata and Lebanon Counties scheduled to start Wednesday, and Dauphin and Mifflin Counties to start Thursday.
The recount must be completed by June 7, with results posted on June 8.
“We’re starting. We’re starting all over again. We’re starting with the mail-in and we’re starting with the precinct ballots and we will count until we get finished,” said Samantha Krepps with Cumberland County, where poll watchers included representatives from both the Oz and McCormick campaigns.
The recount comes after unofficial results from the Department of State show Oz leading McCormick by just 922 votes. Officials said there were 860 undated Republican ballots, not enough to overturn Oz’s lead. However, the Department of State estimated that counties had about 10,000 provisional and absentee ballots from military and overseas voters remaining to count, though it did not know how many were cast by Republican voters.
The recount is expected to cost Pennsylvania taxpayers upwards of $1 million.
Elections officials said they expected the recount would be done in less than a week.
“We did it in November because there was a Commonwealth Court judge,” Krepps said. “We’re used to recounting, and we have to follow the law. The law says recount; we do what the law says.”
It may not be the last recount for Cumberland County, however. A senior official with the McCormick campaign announced Tuesday they will request a hand recount in 12 counties they said had large discrepancies between votes cast and votes counted. Those counties include Allegheny, Centre, Chester, Cumberland, Erie, Lancaster, Monroe, Schuylkill, Delaware, Bucks, Westmoreland and York. A request for hand recounts must be paid by the campaign requesting it.
Meanwhile a debate over undated and misdated ballots is heading to Commonwealth Court. McCormick’s campaign, hoping to close the vote gap, filed the lawsuit to compel counties to promptly count those ballots.
Oz, the Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party oppose McCormick’s request. A separate case that affects those same ballots could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
State law requires an accurate date, but a federal court has already ruled the envelope date doesn’t matter as long as the ballot arrived on time from a qualified voter.
The Pa. Department of State also recommended counting those ballots.
The guidance is not mandatory, however. So far the south central counties of Cumberland, Franklin, Lebanon and Perry say they will count undated ballots, while Dauphin County is not including them at this time. (Cumberland had only one undated Republican ballot, which was blank and therefore can’t be counted anyway.)