Recount officially ordered in Pennsylvania Republican Senate race as Mehmet Oz holds narrow lead over David McCormick

With Mehmet Oz and David McCormick within one-half of one percent of each other, Acting Pennsylvania Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman ordered a recount Thursday in the Republican primary race for a U.S. Senate seat.

Counties can start their recounts as early as Friday but no later than June 1. Recounts must be completed by June 7.

As of Thursday, the vote totals for the Republican candidates in the 67 counties were:

The extreme closeness of the race mandated the recount under state law. It is only the seventh time the provision has been triggered since the law took effect in 2004, with a total of three recounts actually carried out in the past. In other cases, candidates have waived their rights to a recount.

— Rita Giordano

It costs money to run elections, and a recount is no different.

Acting Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman estimated Wednesday that the recount of the Republican Senate primary will cost at least $1 million, a number that could very well go higher depending on how counties choose to count the votes.

Having a vote count done quickly and accurately requires machines and people to run them. Want faster machines? You’ll have to pay to rent or buy them. Want more people? You’ll have to pay them for their time.

Counties don’t exactly have a ton of extra equipment sitting around unused. They use what they can be to be as fast as possible the first time.

But during a recount, votes have to be counted on a different type of machine from the first time they were tallied — for example, using a high-speed scanner to read large batches of ballots instead of the polling place machines that scanned them one at a time on election day, or using a different model of high-speed scanner to count mail ballots.

As a result, many counties will lease equipment, which is what Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie said his county is doing “so we have enough to follow the recount procedures and get it done in time.”

Centre County is using its existing high-speed scanners, normally used for mail ballots, to count its in-person votes, and renting a more expensive model of high-speed scanner to run the mail ballots, said elections director Beth A. Lechman.

Some counties are buying equipment or did so last year. Delaware County elections director Jim Allen said he had already been considering buying more high-speed scanners in anticipation of a recount this November. As the Senate race appeared headed to an all-but-certain recount last week, the county approved purchasing two more high-speed scanners. The scanners arrived this week and cost the county $13,000 total.

Philadelphia already has what it needs in part because it already bought more equipment during last November’s recount, said Nick Custodio, deputy under city elections chief Lisa Deeley.

The state reimburses counties $50 for each ballot box they count, which is often enough to cover the cost. Philadelphia, for example, was fully reimbursed last November and should be this time as well, Custodio said.

Whether other counties will be fully covered will also depend on staffing.

Custodio noted that work done this week will be more costly than normal because some workers will be entitled to weekend and holiday pay.

And it’s not just the workers that are physically recounting the ballots, said Forrest Lehman, elections director in Lycoming County.

“In our case, we will have 20 people working for the better part of the day at whatever our hourly rates are, plus advertising, security, etc.,” he said. In addition, he said, consider “all the time the county staff are putting in on the front end to plan, and the time and effort of the attorneys involved, and you start to see just how expensive it becomes.”

— Jonathan Lai

Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary is headed to a recount.

Acting Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman announced the recount Wednesday afternoon as celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz maintains a razor-thin margin of about 900 votes over former hedge fund CEO David McCormick.

A recount will take several days, but the actual process of counting votes should go faster than it had initially after ballots were cast last Tuesday. Expect the numbers to change slightly — the recount will mean some votes previously read by machines will be reviewed by humans — and for both campaigns to closely watch, and maybe fight over, every vote.

For elections officials, the good news is they have recent experience from when an automatic recount was triggered in November’s statewide Commonwealth Court race, so they know what to expect and how to run the process smoothly.

» READ MORE: Pennsylvania’s heading to a recount in the Oz-McCormick Republican Senate primary. Here’s what to expect.

— Jonathan Lai

The recount must be held by the third Wednesday after election day, which in this case would be June 1. The secretary of state said counties can begin as soon as this Friday.

Because Monday is Memorial Day, several county elections officials said they expect to begin next week, perhaps not until Wednesday, which would follow the same timeline as last November.

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

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

That means it can take a little more than three weeks after election day for the recount results to be finalized and published. In last fall’s election, the recount was completed and the results were published on Nov. 24, 22 days after the election on Nov. 2.

» READ MORE: Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary heads to a recount as Oz and McCormick scrap over ballots in court

— Jonathan Lai

In addition to undertaking a recount, there are thousands of ballots that remain uncounted in the tight Republican Senate race between Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.

The outstanding ballots are:

Having this many outstanding votes to count after an election is not unusual. Vote counts always continue for days and weeks after election day, though they rarely get noticed because races have long been called by this point.

— Jonathan Lai and Rob Tornoe