Pennsylvania Could Determine Control of the Senate, But First They’ll Need to Count Votes

Mark Niquette and Ryan Teague Beckwith
·5 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Control of the US Senate risks being decided in a pivotal race in Pennsylvania, where conditions are ripe for another chaotic post-election fight.

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All of the factors that led the state to be the epicenter of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are once again in place: a divided electorate, disputes over election rules, a delay in counting Democratic-leaning mail ballots and Republican candidates who are willing to go to extreme lengths to contest the results.

Polls show Democrat John Fetterman holding a narrow lead over Republican Mehmet Oz in one of a handful of toss-up Senate races that will determine control of the evenly divided Senate, where Democrats currently hold it thanks to a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris. Senate races in Georgia, where a run-off is possible, Nevada and Wisconsin are also expected to be close.

And in Arizona, the Republican nominees for governor and secretary of state -- the key elections official -- are promoters of Trump’s false claims of election fraud and may challenge the results if they lose.

But Pennsylvania is likely to be a focal point on election night because of the way it counts votes. Unlike other states with heavy vote-by-mail use, counties there can’t begin the time-consuming processing and counting of mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. In 2020, Joe Biden wasn’t declared the winner of the Keystone State -- and the presidency -- for four days, until the Saturday after the election.

With vote-by-mail largely favored by Democratic voters after Trump called for voters to cast ballots in person on Election Day 2020, that will likely lead to another “red mirage” in which results from votes cast on Election Day -- when more Republicans vote -- become public first and are slowly whittled down as mail ballots favoring Democrats are counted. Trump contested his loss in the state, falsely claiming that the late-counted Democratic votes were fraudulent.

That partisan imbalance has remained. So far, 71% of the 1.2 million mail ballot applications are from Democrats, according to state data.

Pennsylvania played a lead role in Trump’s attack on the 2020 election. It was one of four states sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in an unsuccessful case before the US Supreme Court and one of two states to face objections from Republicans during the electoral count in Congress. A number of key Trump allies in that effort, including Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano and several members of Congress, hail from the state.

Adding fuel to the fire is an ongoing dispute over whether to count mail ballots when voters failed to add the date next to their signature on the envelope. If the race continues to be close, election watchers say they fear that could lead to court challenges.

“There’s reason for great concern, given that the control of the United States Senate hangs in the balance,” said Al Schmidt, president and chief executive of the Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan civic organization in Philadelphia and a former Philadelphia city commissioner who faced death threats for pushing back on Trump’s false claims of election fraud in 2020.

Pennsylvania officials expect far fewer mail-in ballots this year compared with the 2020 presidential election conducted during the coronavirus pandemic, and counties have become more efficient and invested in high-speed ballot sorters and workers to speed up the counting.

But the delay in counting until mail-in ballots until Election Day means that some counties, especially larger counties like Philadelphia, can’t finish counting on Election Night. Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman has warned that Pennsylvania will once again not have unofficial results on Election Night.

“It would be surprising to me if any media outlet were to be able to call the election on election night” if the race is close, said Jeff Greenburg, a former Mercer County elections director and adviser for Voter Project, a non-profit that promotes voting by mail.

Officials in Philadelphia, the commonwealth’s most populous county and a Democratic stronghold, plan to keep counting through the night but still don’t expect to have most mail-in ballots tallied until 9 a.m. the following day.

There are certain to be disputes over counting mail-in ballots with envelopes that aren’t dated as required by law. The US Supreme Court last week vacated a lower court decision that would require the ballots be counted, but the state is directing counties to count them. The Republican National Committee and other GOP groups have already sued to stop the counting of undated ballots.

It’s possible the lawsuit won’t be resolved before November, which experts fear could lead to a scenario in which a close race is decided by a court decision about whether to count a few thousand undated ballots. Provisional and military ballots also can’t be counted until the Friday after the election and could be the source of legal challenges if the margins are slim.

There was litigation over undated mail ballots in the May Republican US Senate primary in Pennsylvania that Oz won by 951 votes over former Bridgewater Associates Chief Executive Officer David McCormick after an automatic recount.

Matthew Weil, an elections expert with the Bipartisan Policy Center, a D.C. think tank, said that he expects recounts and litigation in any close statewide race this year.

“Our definition of close is probably broader than it used to be,” he said. “If it’s within two percentage points anywhere, I think we’re going to see candidates contest those results.”

Pennsylvania officials are stressing that if a race can’t be called on Election night, that doesn’t mean the results should be doubted.

“This delay does not mean anything nefarious is happening,” Chapman told reporters in an Oct. 11 call. “It simply means that the process is working as it’s designed to work in Pennsylvania, and that election officials are doing their job to count every vote.”

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