A recount effort to decide the razor-thin Republican Senate primary is underway in Allegheny County, as with election offices all across the state. And the lion's share of the work appears to be on pace for completion Thursday morning.
At a county warehouse on Pittsburgh’s North Side, roughly 100 county workers assembled and were sworn in at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning to begin the work of rescanning more than 290,000 ballots cast either by mail or in person on May 17.
By 4 p.m., the county had completed its scanning of mail-in and absentee ballots, and was more than two-thirds of the way through counting the votes that were cast in person on Election Day. "The remaining ballots will be scanned tomorrow morning," the county said.
“We’ll drop those results into a database and come up with a new set of results,” said County Elections Manager David Voye as the process got underway.
The recount was prompted by a state law that requires a retabulation of votes in any statewide race where the margin of victory is less than half of 1 percent of the votes cast. And the Republican Senate contest qualifies: Fewer than 1,000 votes separate celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz from hedge fund executive David McCormick in a seven-way contest.
The recounting work proceeded without incident Wednesday morning, as workers fed ballots into scanners. State law requires that counties not use the same means to tote up votes as they used on Election Night.
In Allegheny County, the problem is addressed by virtue of the fact that the county uses two separate models of scanning device — a high-speed model used last month to tabulate the mail-in ballots, and a slower model to handle the in-person vote at voting places on Election Day. This week, the county will reverse that approach, so that each ballot is ultimately scanned by two different types of machine.
While it’s only the results of the Republican primary that are at issue – Lt. Gov.John Fetterman won the Democratic Senate primary handily — all the ballots with Senate votes are being recounted. That’s because it would be more time-consuming to separate out the Republican votes on the front end.
By state law, candidates are allowed to monitor the proceedings, or to have attorneys do so. Political parties are also allowed to send representatives. The Oz and McCormick campaigns had just one lawyer on hand apiece Wednesday morning.
Counting is expected to continue into Thursday, in part to address cases where "overvotes" — those in which a voter appeared to vote for more than one candidate -- confuse the total. Officials must submit results of the recount to the Department of State by June 8, though that may not end the matter. A legal fight over mail-in ballots that were not dated by the voter — but were received by election officials before polls closed — is pending in both state and federal court.
This is the second recount carried out in the past year: A similar effort was undertaken following a razor-thin Commonwealth Court race last fall. It’s the fourth time a statewide recount has been undertaken since the state law requiring them in close races was passed in 2004.
This story was updated at 4:42 p.m. on June 1, 2022 to include updated information about the progress of ballot counting by county workers.
