Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s campaign team announced they are seeking a hand recount in 12 Pennsylvania counties in the May 17th GOP Senate primary as the margin between McCormick and Mehmet Oz remains razor-thin.
Fox News reports:
McCormick trails rival Dr. Mehmet Oz by just over 900 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. Oz’s extremely narrow lead is well within the 0.5% threshold for an automatic recount of the results, which was ordered by state officials last week. Some counties have already begun the mandated machine recount, and all must start no later than Wednesday. Counties must conclude their tabulations by noon on June 7 and submit their recount results by noon the next day.
But the McCormick senior campaign official lamented, “We’re doing a recount of a count that I actually don’t know the results of… We have essentially two different sources of data. One being the counties. Two being the Department of State, with completely different [results].”
The official said, “We’re going to ask today for a hand recount of 12 different counties to get a complete sense of the delta between what the counties are providing our campaign and what the Department of State [is providing]… We have between 15-20 thousand vote discrepancy between the ballots cast and the ballots counted.”
“We’re going to understand with a hand recount where any abnormalities exist and actually have a receipt that we can trust and verify,” the official emphasized.
The 12 counties are Allegheny, York, Centre, Chester, Cumberland, Erie, Lancaster, Monroe, Schuykill, Delaware, Bucks, and Westmoreland.
A senior campaign official for McCormick said that the requested hand recount-which would be paid for by McCormick- could run concurrently with the state-mandated automatic machine recount to avoid delays.
