HARRISBURG, PA (PA) – Pennsylvania’s top election official said Wednesday that the margin between the top two Republican primary candidates for last week’s U.S. Senate is tight enough to trigger a statewide countdown , dragging the result in June as candidates fight in court. .
Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman said the difference in the total votes of the top two – the famous heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz and former hedge fund CEO David McCormick — are within the scope of state law for a mandatory count.
Oz, backed by former President Donald Trump, led McCormick by 902 votes, or 0.07 percentage points, of the 1,343,643 votes reported by the state on Wednesday.
One question for McCormick’s campaign is whether there are enough ballots left to make up the difference with Oz.
The State Department estimated that counties had about 10,000 provisional and absent ballots to count, but did not know how many were issued by Republican voters.
There are another 860 Republican ballots by mail with no handwritten dates in their envelopes that are the subject of court cases, department officials said.
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, such as the numbers transposed when counting the ballot voting data, which could go in any direction, they say.
Under Pennsylvania’s counting law, the separation between candidates must be within the 0.5% margin of the law. The Associated Press will not declare a race winner until the count is over. This could last until June 8.
The winner will face Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman in the November midterm election in what Democrats see as his best chance of securing a tightly divided Senate seat. The incumbent, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, is retiring after serving two terms.
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 Wednesday, including provisional, military, and absenteeism ballots abroad.
Chapman’s counting order is mandatory unless the losing candidate requests that it not be carried out. McCormick had no plans to reject a count and said in a statement that “we expect a speedy resolution so that our party can unite and defeat” Fetterman in the fall.
The counties will begin the count next week and have until June 7 to finish and another day to report the results to the state.
In these cases, McCormick hopes to get help to close the voting gap with Oz.
His campaign has called on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to force counties to count these ballots quickly. 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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