Counties begin recount of GOP votes in U.S. Senate race
Counties across Pennsylvania began recounting ballots Wednesday in the tight Republican primary race for U.S. Senate between Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.
The statewide recount was triggered following the May 17 primary because Oz leads McCormick by a razor-thin 922 votes out of more than 1.34 million ballots cast statewide in the race, with the margin falling within the 0.5% threshold for the automatic review.
Workers in Fayette County began performing their recount at noon, and Elections Director MaryBeth Kuznik said they plan to count all ballots in every race during the process before printing out only the results for the Republican U.S. Senate campaign.
Kuznik was unsure how long the process will take with the Dominion electronic voting machines, although it must be completed by June 7 so the state Department of State can publish the results the following day.
“The plan is to go carefully and slowly. We don’t want to rush it,” Kuznik said. “We’re not trying to get it done quick. We’re trying to get it done right. We want to take our time and do it with deliberate attention.”
The recount was being performed in the county’s new elections office at the former Gallatin Bank Building at 2 W. Main St. in Uniontown.
“Ballots from the polling places were not sorted (on Election Day),” Kuznik said. “We will recount everything and at the end we’ll just print out the GOP race.”
The mechanics of the recount are slightly different in Washington County because voters there use ES&S electronic voting machines to cast their ballots. But the overall process is the same as the workers performed the recount the county’s meeting room inside the Courthouse Square building at 100 W. Beau St. in Washington.
Washington County Elections Director Melanie Ostrander started the process about 9:30 a.m. by instructing a dozen temporary elections office workers on how to run all in-person ballots and mail-in ballots through the scanning machines in a recount that is expected to take a couple of days.
Unlike Election Day when the office tabulated in-person votes using memory sticks that pulled vote totals from the precinct counting machines, Ostrander said they’re running each individual paper ballot through their high-speed scanner to ensure the figures match that of the original totals. Meanwhile, the mail-in and absentee ballots are being hand-fed one at a time through the precinct machines to make sure the process is being handled thoroughly.
“The precinct scanners are being used to scan the absentee and mail-in ballots, and the central count scanners are being used to scan the Election Day ballots,” Ostrander said. “We’re not using the memory cards or any of the figures from Election Day. We’re taking the physical ballot that the voter voted (with) and rescanning that physical ballot. Once we have new data, we’ll upload to the software and then we’ll compare the results from the Election Day data to the recount data.”
Washington County is only counting Republican primary votes in the U.S. Senate race because that is the one required under the state’s automatic recount rules. It’s similar to last fall when the state required counties to recount ballots for a Commonwealth Court race, although there were more ballots in that election because it was part of the general election open to all party-affiliated and unaffiliated voters.
Meanwhile, McCormick’s campaign is fighting to have mail-in and absentee ballots counted that were left undated on the exterior envelope by the voter, despite state election rules that require the envelope to be signed and dated. The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily stayed an appeal from the 2021 election requesting those ballots be counted, meaning the McCormick campaign will have to continue its legal challenge for them to be tabulated.
Ostrander said the county received 46 such ballots that were signed but undated, 36 of which were from Democrats and 10 that were from Republican voters. Those ballots have been segregated and counted, but have not been included in the final tally, Ostrander said, as they await guidance from the courts on whether or not they will be considered legal votes.
There are only a handful of questionable mail-in and absentee ballots in Fayette County. That office received 52 signed but undated ballots, 46 of which were from Democrats and only six that were from Republicans.
It’s unlikely that even if all undated Republican main-in ballots across Pennsylvania are counted that it will allow McCormick to overtake Oz, since there appears to be fewer than the 922 vote difference.
Judy Snyder, who is serving as Greene County’s interim elections director, did not respond by press time to an email seeking comment on the process there.