U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Penn., refuses to concede the 2024 election even though his Republican challenger has claimed victory and the Associated Press has declared Dave McCormick the winner.
Casey has held elected office since 1997, when he was elected Pennsylvania’s auditor general. He also served as state treasurer before being elected as a U.S. Senator in 2006. He was seeking his fourth term.
During his time in office, Casey took a break from solving crime, hunger, and war to spend time impeaching President-elect Donald Trump for asking questions about the 2020 election.
“President Trump should be impeached and removed from office because he betrayed his oath to the Constitution and incited a mob to violence,” Casey said in a 2021 statement. “There should also be accountability for those members of Congress who led the effort to overthrow a democratic election. If they refuse to resign their office, then Congress should begin to explore censure or expulsion.”
Now Casey is the one asking questions about election results.
As of Monday evening, McCormick had a lead of just over 35,000 votes, which is a .51 percent lead.
In Pennsylvania, any lead of less than half a percentage point triggers an automatic recount, and the margin is just a hair over that. If a recount is triggered, the trailing candidate has the option of declining the recount.
Last week the Department of State said there were “at least 100,000 ballots remaining to be adjudicated.” That includes provisional ballots and overseas ballots.
According to Department of State data, 37,642 overseas voters requested ballots to vote in Pennsylvania. Normally the return rate is less than 100 percent; some folks request a ballot and never send it back to be counted; others are returned after the deadline.
In addition, not all provisional ballots are counted. Under state law, those with flaws or certain issues must be thrown out. It could be, for example, that a ballot that does not contain a secrecy envelope or lacks a signature, or a ballot was cast by someone who already voted somewhere else.
Lancaster County Commissioner Ray D’Agostino, who is on the county election board, said roughly half of provisional ballots are typically rejected, and because of that, he does not believe the numbers are there for Casey to win.
“That’s why the AP called [the race],” D’Agostino told The Federalist.
On Monday afternoon, some 87,000 provisional ballots were still being counted around the state, including around 20,000 in Philadelphia and 12,000 in Allegheny, plus others in a few smaller counties, an election source told The Federalist, and Democrat observers are keeping a close eye on the examination of each individual ballot.
Hillary Clinton’s infamous attorney Marc Elias, an architect of the Russian dossier hoax that was used to discredit Trump, indicated on social media that he is looking for an angle to fight the Senate election results in court.
Elias did not respond to a request for comment or provide an explanation of the plan he hinted at on X.
The Senate election case has already been briefly considered by the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. A formula guides how many observers may watch the canvassing of votes. Pennsylvania law allows one observer from each political party, plus one observer for each candidate.
Philadelphia had 37 Democrat candidates, which allows Democrats to have 38 observers. But the county only had 10 Republicans run for office, making 11 Republicans eligible to observe the counting of provisional ballots. This put Republicans at a disadvantage because 11 observers could not see every ballot an election worker handled, but Democrats had enough to see everything. McCormick asked for the counting to be set up in a way that allowed Republican observers to also see each ballot, but the court denied that request.
Elias has long criticized Trump for questioning the 2020 election results.
“Trumpism’s defining feature is a belief that every electoral outcome that does not favor Trump and his allies must be fraudulent,” Elias wrote in December 2020, yet Elias has stepped into Pennsylvania to cast doubt on the results and give false hope to the losing Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is another newly minted election denier. Schumer refused to invite McCormick to a Senate orientation for freshmen senators. He too worked for the impeachment of Trump.
“America is not a dictatorship,” Schumer said in a 2021 statement on Trump’s impeachment. “We have been and will forever remain a Democracy that respects and reveres the rule of law, including the bedrock principle that the voters choose our leaders — that just power can only derive from the consent of the governed.”
Get out of the way, Senator. The voters have spoken.