By
Pennsylvania's Republican Senate primary is headed to a recount, the state announced Wednesday, with television doctor Mehmet Oz leading former hedge fund CEO David McCormick by a mere 902 votes.
There are two tranches of ballots that need to be adjudicated before Pennsylvania can decide a winner, wrinkles that could make that recount unique.
The first is the group of about 10,000 ballots — a mix of military, overseas and provisional ballots — that need to be counted before the recount can begin. It's currently unclear how many of those ballots were Republican votes versus Democratic votes.
And the other is a group of 860 GOP ballots returned to election officials on time but without dates. The McCormick campaign went to court to call on the state to count those ballots, while the Oz campaign, as well as the state and national Republican Parties, say the votes shouldn't be counted.
These wrinkles could help shape who eventually wins the race. But a recent history shows that statewide recounts rarely prompt a change in the winner once all votes are cast, as NBC's Allan Smith chronicled last year.
Multiple recounts in Georgia's presidential race in 2020 affirmed Democrat Joe Biden's victory over then-President Donald Trump (Trump did net about 1,300 votes, but still trailed by more than 12,000).
A statewide recount of the 2016 presidential results in Wisconsin didn't change the results there, with Trump picking up 162 votes in the process.
A 2020 report by FairVote, a nonprofit that promotes electoral reforms like Ranked Choice Voting, found just 31 statewide recounts between 2000 and 2019, and only three where the result was ultimately changed by the recount.
The most recent example of a statewide recount prompting a reversal in the election result — Minnesota's 2008 Senate election, where Democrat Al Franken entered the recount process down 215 votes and ended up winning by 225.
