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The race for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania is officially heading to a recount.
On Wednesday, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt ordered Pennsylvania’s 67 counties to conduct a recount under a provision of the state election code that requires one when the margin of a statewide race is within 0.5%.
With Republican Dave McCormick receiving 3,380,310 votes to incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s 3,350,972 votes as of noon Wednesday, the two candidates were separated by just 0.43%.
The Associated Press has already called the race for McCormick, who has declared victory, but Casey has yet to concede, as he holds on to hope that outstanding provisional and overseas votes will help him close the gap.
Counties had until Tuesday to submit their unofficial results to the Pennsylvania Department of State. These results include nearly all votes cast by mail or in person on Election Day, but may still be missing some provisional ballots and overseas votes that are still being adjudicated.
According to a tally by Decision Desk HQ, roughly 72,000 ballots still need to be adjudicated, though not all may count due to voter errors on envelopes or issues with the voter’s eligibility.
Casey could have declined to move ahead with the recount before noon Wednesday, but he did not do so.
The state and counties pay for the effort. Counties will recount all ballots either by hand or using different tabulation machines than they initially used to conduct the election.
The recount must begin by the third Wednesday following the election, which is Nov. 20, and results must be submitted to the secretary by the following Wednesday, Nov. 27.
Can a recount change election results?
Recounts that change the outcome of a race are extremely rare, according to a study of statewide recounts by Fair Vote, a national nonprofit focused on ranked-choice voting.
The group analyzed nearly 7,000 statewide races between 2000 and 2023, and found 36 recounts in that time. Only three of these resulted in a change of outcome.
“All three reversals occurred when the initial margin was less than 0.06% of all votes cast for the top two candidates,” according to the report.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of State, the automatic statewide recount has been triggered seven times since the 0.5% rule went into effect in 2004. Trailing candidates in three of those races waived the recount, and the four recounts that did move forward did not change the outcome.
The most recent was in the 2022 Republican primary for U.S. Senate, which also featured McCormick — that time, as the trailing candidate.
In that race, Mehmet Oz beat McCormick by 902 votes — a margin of 0.07%. McCormick conceded before the recount was complete, but the count ultimately shifted the margin by only 49 votes, in Oz’s favor.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
