U.S. Senate Republican nominee Mehmet Oz greets fans after the primary race resulted in an automatic count due to results closed on May 17, 2022 in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
Stephanie Keith | Getty Images
The Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary race between Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dave McCormick will go to a count, the head of state elections announced Wednesday.
Oz, a famous doctor and first-time candidate backed by former President Donald Trump, led former hedge fund CEO McCormick in the final vote count by less than half a percentage point, the U.S. office said. Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman.
This narrow margin led to a mandatory count under Pennsylvania law.
The bill is estimated to cost more than $ 1 million in taxpayer funds, Chapman’s office said. Pennsylvania counties must begin ballot counting before June 1 and must finish counting before June 7 at noon ET.
The announcement came more than a week after the primary election. The Pennsylvania State Department attributed the delay to the fact that state laws do not allow “pre-scrutiny” of ballots before election day. That means counties could only start counting ballots by mail on election morning, Chapman’s office said Tuesday.
His office noted at the time that some 900,000 voting applications had been mailed to the primaries.
The eventual Republican primary winner will run in the general election against Pennsylvania Gov. John Fetterman, who is expected to win the state Democratic Senate primary by a wide margin.
The swing race in the Senate could prove to be the most crucial struggle of the middle legislatures. Democrats are trying to keep control of the Senate, which is divided equally between 50 Republicans and 50 senators who are with Democrats.
The Pennsylvania seat, which is being vacated by Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, may offer the best opportunity for Democrats to turn a red-blue seat.
The discouraging competition between Oz and McCormick continued as the results of the Republican primary race leaked.
McCormick filed a lawsuit Monday to make sure counties don’t reject some ballots in the mail that arrived on time but didn’t have handwritten dates on the envelopes. The Republican Party has sided with Oz to oppose McCormick’s effort.
While votes were still being counted, Trump wrote on social media that Oz “should declare victory,” claiming that it makes it much harder for them to cheat on ballots they “just found.”
Trump tried to do so in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to President Joe Biden. The former president falsely claimed that the legitimately mailed ballot boxes, which many states counted more slowly than usual due to an influx during the coronavirus pandemic, were full of fraud.
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