Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate race headed for a recount
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Department of State announced that the state's election for U.S. Senate will go to a recount. Based on ABC News's reports, Republican Dave McCormick leads Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. by 0.4 percentage points, 48.9% to 48.5%. That puts the margin inside of the 0.5-point threshold that mandates a recount under Pennsylvania law. This has also played out because, as Carter Walker at VoteBeat reported, Casey did not waive his right to a recount.
Overall, McCormick's raw vote lead is a bit less than 30,000 votes, although that could narrow further — the state reported that there were about 80,000 ballots whose validity is still be adjudicated (about 60,000 provisional ballots and 20,000 absentee and mail-in ballots). Still, Casey will have to gain a lot from those ballots to have much chance of winning in a recount. A FairVote analysis of statewide recounts from 2000 to 2023 found that just 36 recounts occurred out of nearly 7,000 statewide elections in that time. Of those, recounts reversed the outcome in just three races, all of which had margins of 0.06 points or fewer — roughly six times smaller than McCormick's current edge.