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The recount in the Pennsylvania Senate Race got started yesterday, more than two weeks after election day. 

Republican challenger Dave McCormick led incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey by about 17,000 votes out of almost 7 million ballots counted as of Monday. That is inside the 0.5% margin threshold to trigger an automatic statewide recount under state law.

At 8 a.m. Wednesday, the ballot counting machines at the elections warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia were fired up.

“We are doing an extra check this time, because of the closeness of the race for U.S. Senate,” says Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein.

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The results of the recount were scheduled to be released next Monday but by 5pm today, most of the votes had already been recounted. And to no one’s surprise, they showed Dave McCormick still leading by thousands of votes. No recount that started with a vote differential this large has ever changed the results.

As of 5 p.m. Thursday, when the Pennsylvania Department of State said the initial count of votes in all counties had been completed, incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey trailed Republican challenger Dave McCormick by 16,349 votes…

FairVote, a national nonprofit focused on ranked-choice voting, analyzed nearly 7,000 statewide races around the country between 2000 and 2023 and found 36 recounts in that time, only three of which resulted in a change of outcome. All three of those reversals occurred when the initial margin was within 0.06%.

Shortly after word of the results began circulating, Sen. Bob Casey called Dave McCormick and conceded the race. Casey then released a video announcing the decision. “I just called Dave McCormick to congratulate him on his election to represent Pennsylvania in the United States Senate,” Casey said. He continued, “As the first count of ballots is completed, Pennsylvanians can move forward with the knowledge that their voices were heard, whether there vote was one of the first to be counted or the last.”

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Casey’s refusal to concede was becoming an embarrassment to Democrats, especially after one Bucks County commissioner explained she wanted to count votes the state Supreme Court had already said should not be counted. 

Bob Casey has refused to admit that it is over. This was perhaps understandable in the immediate days after the vote, as Casey entertained the forlorn hope that outstanding mail-in and absentee ballots in populous Democratic-leaning counties would disproportionately break in his favor. But it was already clear by November 12, when the editors of National Review first wrote about Casey’s intransigence, that the math simply could not possibly add up for him, as indeed it has not.

The twist is that since that day, Casey’s strategy — spearheaded by his counsel, Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias — has turned to seeking to count illegal ballots. As the margin in the race closed to around 17,000 votes, Casey’s Democratic allies on the boards of elections in Philadelphia-area counties were publicly enjoined by his team to adopt a strategy of open defiance of the Pennsylvania state election code, which stipulates that undated ballots are automatically invalid and cannot be counted for any purposes. The election boards of Bucks, Philadelphia, Delaware, and Centre Counties all happily did so, with one Bucks County election commissioner, Diane Ellis-Marseglia, proudly asserting that Democrats would count illegal, unmarked, late-arriving ballots — despite two preexisting court rulings demanding otherwise. Her rationale: “We all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country. People violate laws all they want.”

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Ellis-Marseglia was eventually reprimanded by the court and by the governor for her behavior. She claimed her statement had been misunderstood. It wasn’t.

Anyway, I think that’s why Casey is leaning so hard into the idea of election integrity as his reason for hanging in there. He’s desperate to claim he was on the right side of this rather than admit he was on the wrong side.

Senator-elect McCormick was very gracious to Casey in victory.