PHILADELPHIA — Two days after polls closed in Pennsylvania’s closely watched primary election, the Associated Press deemed the Republican U.S. Senate race still too early to call Thursday, with celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz and hedge fund CEO David McCormick seemingly headed toward a recount — and final results unlikely to be determined any time soon.
By early Thursday afternoon, more than 1.3 million votes had been counted in the Republican Senate primary. With more votes to come, the winner would need a victory margin of about 6,700 to be outside the recount line; Oz had just 1,270 more of the counted votes than McCormick by Thursday night.
Pennsylvania law triggers an automatic recount of a statewide election when the winning margin is less than 0.5% of the total votes cast in a race.
The gap between Oz and McCormick has narrowed in the last day as county election officials continue to tally more mail ballots, the AP said, meaning the race for who will battle Democrat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman for the open U.S. Senate seat in November may be headed for a recount that could take weeks.
As of Thursday, there were tens of thousands of votes left to be counted statewide, most of which come from Democrats. The bulk of mail ballots left are from Philadelphia, Delaware, and Lancaster Counties, but some in-person ballots from Allegheny County, which typically has a strong Republican showing, also remain outstanding.
It’s unclear exactly how many Republican ballots are left, but it’s unlikely that one candidate would see such a strong increase in vote count to break out of the 0.5% recount margin.
And of the Republican ballots left to count, a portion of them — more than one out of three of the counted votes so far — won’t be votes for either Oz or McCormick.
The remaining ballots to be counted come from a variety of sources, and it’s impossible to know exactly how many votes will ultimately be counted. While nearly all votes cast in-person on primary day have already been counted, a small number of precincts haven’t yet been reported because of issues such as poll workers returning USB drives or voting-machine cartridges to the wrong location. Allegheny County, for example, said it would process and upload the results from 31 precincts when its elections board met Friday to begin finalizing the vote count.
There are also mail ballots that need to be re-created by hand because they wouldn’t scan, such as when a ballot is crinkled or has a coffee stain.
Similarly, provisional ballots have not yet been counted, and some of those will be counted and others rejected. Those last-chance ballots are set aside and counted last, only after elections officials confirm a voter’s eligibility to cast that vote. In recent elections, the majority of provisional ballots have come from voters who requested mail ballots and then showed up at the polls to vote in person.
And overseas and military voters’ ballots can continue coming in until Tuesday. Those ballots are counted if they are postmarked by primary day and received up to one week after. It’s not possible to know how many of those votes there will be, since they have not yet been received, but the number should be small.
Despite the neck-and-neck race likely headed for automatic recount, McCormick and Oz have projected confidence that they will prevail.
“We’re moving in the right direction, and pretty confident we’re going to end with me in the win column,” McCormick told conservative Philadelphia radio talk show host Rich Zeoli on Thursday.
“We invested a lot in making sure we reached out to people who were absentee ballots, absentee voters,” McCormick said, noting that the mail ballots “have been very favorable to us — we win those consistently.”
As of Thursday afternoon, McCormick had received about 45,000 votes by mail, while Oz had received 32,400.
Oz — who has branded himself a “conservative outsider” and was endorsed by former President Donald Trump — told his applauding supporters on primary night that “when all of the votes are tallied, I am confident we will win.”
On a call with reporters Thursday, an Oz campaign official reiterated that sentiment.
On Wednesday, Trump publicly pressured Oz to follow in his 2020 footsteps by preemptively declaring victory before all votes are tallied, with the former president echoing his previous false statements baselessly alleging election fraud in Pennsylvania.
How do recounts work in Pennsylvania?
Counties submit their results to the Pennsylvania Department of State on a rolling basis and are required to submit unofficial totals by the end of the Tuesday one week after election day. At that point, the secretary of state is charged with announcing and then ordering a recount by that Thursday.
Six elections have triggered an automatic recount, most recently in November’s Commonwealth Court race. Candidates can waive a recount, and three of the triggered recounts were avoided that way.
Recounts do not have to be conducted by hand — the votes can be tallied on different machines. None of the previous Pennsylvania recounts have changed the outcome of a race.
(Staff writers Sam Morris and Jonathan Tamari contributed to this article.)
