By It has been a week since the Associated Press declared Pennsylvania’s Senate race for Republican Dave McCormick, effectively closing longtime Democratic Senator Bob Casey’s path to victory. Yet the contest is far from settled, at least for Democrats who have now begun what’s being labeled as an attempt to steal a Senate seat.
Central to the electoral struggle are fewer than 80,000 outstanding ballots, representing less than 2% of the total votes cast. Casey, trailing by roughly 25,000 votes, has refused to concede. Instead, he has concentrated on localized battles over small clusters of contested provisional ballots, hoping to close the gap and alter the outcome.
Now, in one county, Democratic commissioners have publicly declared they will ignore the law, and court rulings, and count illegal votes, writes The National Review.
Bucks County, Pa., commissioners have voted to count ballots lacking proper signatures as the Pennsylvania Senate race heads to an automatic recount due to the razor-thin margin by which GOP Senator-elect Dave McCormick has beaten incumbent Senator Bob Casey.
The 2-1 vote of the commissioners board violates a state Supreme Court ruling issued earlier this year and goes against the advice of the board’s legal team, which advised against counting the 124 illegal ballots.
Board chairman Robert Harviie, Jr. and Diane Marseglia voted to accept ballots that voters signed in one section but not another after Democrats challenged the decision not to count the ballots.
Bucks County, Pa., commissioners have voted to count ballots lacking proper signatures as the Pennsylvania Senate race heads to an automatic recount due to the razor-thin margin by which GOP Senator-elect Dave McCormick has beaten incumbent Senator Bob Casey.
The 2-1 vote of the commissioners board violates a state Supreme Court ruling issued earlier this year and goes against the advice of the board’s legal team, which advised against counting the 124 illegal ballots.
Board chairman Robert Harviie, Jr. and Diane Marseglia voted to accept ballots that voters signed in one section but not another after Democrats challenged the decision not to count the ballots.
The Democrat Bucks County Commissioners just voted to count misdated and undated mail in ballots to try and help Bob Casey and one of them straight up says that she knows it’s illegal but simply does not care.
Dems are trying to steal an election in PA.pic.twitter.com/7KP4Qoy31b
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 14, 2024
The Federalist reported that Casey is pushing for ballots cast by unregistered voters to count in his favor, as well.
In counties such as Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware, election boards have been locked in fierce debates over whether to count or reject provisional ballots with procedural errors like missing signatures, lack of privacy envelopes, or discrepancies in voter registration.
In Montgomery County, board chair Neil Makhija, a Democrat, advocated for accepting 80 provisional ballots missing secrecy envelopes, attributing the errors to poll worker mistakes. However, his position faced resistance from both Democratic and Republican colleagues who adhered to legal advice against counting those ballots. Across the state, these board-level decisions are being appealed, guaranteeing that legal battles will persist for weeks, if not months.
Complicating matters further, writes The Philadelphia Inquirer, are mail ballots that lack dates or have incorrect dates on their outer envelopes. Despite multiple rulings by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court mandating their exclusion, some counties, including Philadelphia, Bucks, and Montgomery, have chosen to count them. Election officials argue that these dates serve no practical purpose in determining a ballot’s validity and that rejecting such ballots unfairly disenfranchises voters. Makhija, for instance, contended that the absence of a date provides no reason to dismiss an otherwise validly cast ballot. This position is significant for Casey, as mail-in ballots disproportionately favor Democratic candidates, particularly in strongholds like Philadelphia where Casey has outperformed McCormick.
Meanwhile, McCormick’s campaign and its Republican allies have mounted legal challenges against counties that include undated ballots and other contested categories. They have also petitioned the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to issue an emergency order excluding undated ballots. This legal strategy aims to preserve objections for potential appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, which earlier this year declined to address a similar issue but indicated a willingness to revisit it in the future. Republicans argue that including defective ballots undermines electoral integrity, with McCormick’s campaign attorney James Fitzpatrick characterizing the opposing legal arguments as extreme and outside the mainstream.
The attempt to count illegal votes has been a boon to the Harris campaign as it tries to pay off its millions in debt accrued during the final month of the campaign. Earlier in the week, the campaign began sending fundraising emails claiming that a portion of the proceeds would go to challenging the results in Pennsylvania.
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