Centre County is set to begin recount of PA’s primary election. Will it need to change plans?
Centre County is preparing for the recount of the votes from Pennsylvania’s May primary election to begin on Wednesday, but it’s unclear how a U.S. Senate candidate’s request for a hand recount will affect the plans.
Beth Lechman, director of elections for Centre County, said during Tuesday’s commissioners meeting the state mandated recount of votes in the too-close-to-call Republican primary between David McCormick and Dr. Mehmet Oz will begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday in the Willowbank Building. She expected it to be completed by the end of the day.
But on late Tuesday afternoon, McCormick’s campaign said it will request a hand recount in certain precincts in a number of counties, including Centre, according to reports.
As of 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Centre County Commissioner Michael Pipe said he was unsure how that would impact the planned recount on Wednesday.
“(It) continues to be an evolving situation,” Pipe wrote in a text message.
The Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections, has not commented publicly about the matter.
Centre County has been preparing for the “statutorily required statewide recount” ordered by Acting Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman. If the difference between two of the top candidates for a statewide office is 0.5% of the vote or less, Pennsylvania’s election law requires an automatic recount.
“Mehmet C. Oz and David H. McCormick, the first- and second-place finishers respectively, have vote totals within the one-half of one percent margin that triggers a mandatory recount under state law,” Chapman wrote in a release.
Counties could have started their recount as early as May 27 but no later than June 1; the recount must be completed by noon June 7, and counties must submit the recount results to the Department of State by noon June 8, the release stated.
Lechman said some people from the public who have previously helped in the vote-by-mail center will be there Wednesday and others will be appointed to help with the verification process at the Willowbank Building.
Members of the elections office, additional county employees and some outside people will be appointed to a 10-person verification board. There will be additional volunteers that will take the oath Wednesday morning, Lechman said, but those volunteers will be the ones doing the verification.
“They’ll be verifying the results of the original count to the recount and bringing up any issues of error or discrepancy,” Lechman said.
The recount will be done on two of the DS450s — a ballot scanner and tabulator — that the county owns, and on a DS850 that the county is renting.
“For a recount you must use a different piece of equipment to count those ballots than they were originally counted on. So our mail-in ballots were originally counted on our DS450s, so they’ll be counted on the DS850,” Lechman said.
The undated mail-in ballots have been counted and are included in the counts submitted to the Department of State, she said. There were 61 undated ballots and of those, 58 were counted, she said. Those ballots remain segregated, Centre County Commissioner Steve Dershem said.
Lechman said she expects the recount to be completed by the end of the day Wednesday. There are fewer ballots to count in this election than there were in the November election, which were completed in about a day and a half. Pipe said the county plans to certify official results on Thursday from the recount.
The DOS estimated that the recount cost will exceed $1 million of taxpayer funds. Counties will be reimbursed for the cost of the recount.
