A razor-thin GOP race is all about mail ballots | Election Newsletter

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Well, we thought we’d be done. But it’s Pennsylvania, so of course this primary season had to last a little longer.

Yesterday, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State gave notice that the GOP Senate primary is headed to a recount. She’ll make the recount official today, and it will start in earnest next week.

Former hedge fund executive David McCormick and celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz are separated by less than 1,000 votes, with Oz in front but by a margin well under the 0.5% threshold needed to avoid an automatic recount.

McCormick, in search of votes to close that gap, wants certain mail ballots to be counted despite small technical defects — a position that might seem ironic given Republican efforts to discredit mail ballots over the last few years. It has made those “undated” mail ballots a central focus of the legal and political fight — The Wall Street Journal editorial board called them “the new hanging chads.”

Undated mail ballots are ballots where voters failed to write a date next to their signature on the mailing envelope, as required under state law. But a federal appeals court ruling last week involving a 2021 Lehigh County judicial race said those ballots should count — which sent McCormick, Oz, and their legion of lawyers into a fight over whether they should be counted in this race.

Oz, in the lead and wanting to stay there, has argued undated ballots shouldn’t be counted. And he has the muscle of the Republican Party — state and national — behind him. Both the RNC and the state GOP have said it’s not about supporting Oz over McCormick, it’s about safeguarding the vote for this and future elections. Translation: Democrats, who vote by mail much more than Republicans, will do better in general elections if more mail ballots are counted — including in the 2024 presidential race.

It’s not surprising to see the GOP opposed to counting undated mail ballots. After all, Donald Trump repeatedly and falsely attacked mail voting in 2020, and Pennsylvania Republicans have been campaigning against it ever since. Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for governor, wants to repeal Act 77 — the 2019 law he voted for that greatly expanded mail voting.

But it’s worth noting that plenty of Republicans clearly prefer voting by mail. About 172,000 GOP voters cast mail ballots in last week’s primary. Far more voted in person, but that’s hardly an insignificant number.

And while Democrats vote by mail in far greater numbers — Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro got more than 500,000 mail votes — that’s not an inevitability. Before Trump started attacking mail ballots, Republicans in other states like Florida and Utah were known for investing heavily in absentee voting programs.

So the partisan asymmetry is a political choice, not a law of nature.

And now, more of your questions about recounts answered, courtesy of our colleague and resident election administration expert Jonathan Lai:

Can a recount change things?

Yes. The numbers will almost certainly shift a bit during a recount. This is a normal part of a recount process, and it’s part of why recounts happen. There’s a very small amount of error in counting votes because voters don’t submit perfectly clean, precisely filled-out ballots. When the results are close enough that the errors can matter, we go to a recount.

It’s a normal part of the process, not fraud. So far, neither campaign has alleged any shenanigans in the race, a stark departure from 2020 when Trump prematurely and wrongly declared victory.

When will it be complete?

The recount must be scheduled to begin by the third Wednesday after election day, which in this case would be June 1.

The recount would need to be complete by noon the following Tuesday, or June 7.

Counties have to submit recount results to the Department of State by noon the next day, or June 8, and the secretary of state then publishes the results.

So we should have a winner on or around June 8.

“The people took on the corporations, and the people won.”

—State Rep. Summer Lee, who won a razor-thin Democratic primary in the Pittsburgh-based 12th Congressional District, all but assuring she’ll be the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania.

Thanks for tuning in. We’ll be back after the long weekend!