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Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? All due respect to Sen. John Blutarsky, but it’s been over in Pennsylvania for two weeks — functionally, if not literally.

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With a final tranche of ballots officially counted in Delaware County, the US Senate race in the Keystone State shows Dave McCormick with a substantial lead over incumbent Democrat Bob Casey. That translates to a 0.2% lead, which is well within the 0.5-point margin of an automatic state-wide recount, but far out of reach for it to make much difference:

CNN’s interactive website shows the same result. CNN has not yet called the race for McCormick, but the Associated Press and every other media outlet has. The election is over in every measurable sense.

That hasn’t stopped Casey from backing a recount, which he could waive if he wanted to concede. Casey hasn’t said anything today, but last week Casey insisted he’d fight this to the finish. That “finish” will cost Pennsylvania more than a million dollars, which had some asking Governor Josh Shapiro to intervene and change Casey’s mind. 

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Shapiro declined to do so:

“State law calls for a recount if an election is within a certain margin,” Shapiro said Tuesday at an unrelated news conference in Philadelphia. “It’s up to the candidates to determine whether or not they want to waive that recount. Sen. Casey chose not to.”

Shapiro also noted that McCormick did not waive the recount “when he was a failed candidate for Senate two years ago,” losing the 2022 Senate GOP primary to Mehmet Oz by fewer than 1,000 votes.

Shapiro’s comments will likely rankle Republicans both in the state and nationally, who have already been critical of Shapiro for not speaking out fast enough against Democratic boards of elections voting to count undated ballots against legal precedent and for not speaking out against Casey’s recount effort.

“PA doesn’t need to waste millions of tax dollars on a recount for the US Senate that won’t change the outcome of Election Day,” Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland), the top Republican in the state Senate, wrote on X last week. “Protect our tax dollars and tell Senator Casey to stop. McCormick won.”

There’s a very large difference between a gap of less than a thousand votes and a gap of over 16,000 votes in the odds of a reversal by recount. The former only has slim odds, while the latter has none at all. And it’s well worth noting that McCormick didn’t change the election results in his statewide recount, either — and that election was a lot closer. 

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As I wrote six years ago, recounts fail far more often than not; even in narrow contests, the vote counts shift by a few hundred, not the thousands necessary for it to be worth doing. The Miami Herald put the average vote shift in the three successful recounts/challenges between 2000 and 2016 at just 311 votes.

Why? Because we actually perform amazingly reliably on ballot counting. As long as the voting process itself isn’t corrupted, the vote counts are extremely accurate. Even in the most famous/notorious of the successful challenges — Minnesota’s 2008 Senate race — the total vote shift was less than 550, and that involved months of ballot challenges and legal maneuvering. 

Put simply, a recount will not shift the vote total anywhere near the scale needed to overcome McCormick’s completed-count lead. It would take a protracted election challenge of the kind that Democrats just spent the last four years demonizing as an attack on democracy, and even that would almost certainly fail. Marc Elias should know that; he ran the Al Franken legal challenge that shifted around 525 votes to hand Franken the win, and it took seven months to accomplish that much.

Other than the cost, there’s no reason to fear a recount for that reason, but it’s entirely unnecessary. Everyone but Bob Casey seems to know it. Having run out of legitimate ballots to count and failing to get away with counting illegitimate ballots in the meantime, the election is over. And so is Bob Casey’s reputation. 

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Nevertheless, the recount has now commenced, and … well. Don’t say I never told you so.