HARRISBURG, PA (PA) – With just 910 votes separating the two top Pennsylvania Republican primary candidates for the U.S. Senate, counties are gearing up Thursday to begin the countdown to famed cardiac surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz. and former hedge fund chief executive David McCormick.
At least seven counties (Bedford, Clinton, Crawford, Lehigh, Montour, Tioga and Warren) said they would start on Friday, while most other counties said they would start next week. The initial result of last week’s election remained difficult on Thursday, as some counties were still adding thousands of remaining ballots.
Oz, backed by former President Donald Trump, leads McCormick with just 0.07 percentage points of the more than 1.3 million ballots reported by the state on Thursday. McCormick’s campaign has sought votes to close the gap with Oz, making a legal effort in state courts to force counties to count certain ballots by mail that might otherwise be rejected by technicality.
In one count, most ballots are simply re-scanned electronically. Election workers check ballots by hand if a scanner has not registered a vote or rejected it as a double vote, and they may find more voters there, election lawyers say.
The biggest change in votes could come from the discovery of a data entry error, a human error that could go in any direction, they say.
The count will drag the official result of the Republican primaries until June 8.
The GOP race winner will face Democratic nominee Gov. John Fetterman in the November midterm contest. Democrats see this as their best chance of getting a narrowly divided Senate seat. The incumbent, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, is retiring after serving two terms.
The separation between Oz and McCormick is within the 0.5% margin needed to trigger a count under Pennsylvania law, and the state’s top election official ordered the count Wednesday. The Associated Press will not declare a race winner until the count is over.
The deadline for counties to report their unofficial results to the state election office was Tuesday. However, counties continued to count thousands of ballots on Thursday, including temporary, military and absentee ballots abroad.
Counties have until June 7 to complete a count and another day to report results to the state.
Judicial decisions could affect the outcome.
McCormick’s campaign has called on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to order counties to obey a federal appeals court ruling and count ballots by mail that did not have a handwritten date on the outer envelope. A lower court has ordered a hearing next Tuesday on the matter.
Oz, the Republican National Committee, and the state Republican Party oppose McCormick’s request. A separate case involving these same ballots could reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at twitter.com/timelywriter.
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