Remaining Lancaster County ballots to be tallied ahead of potential recount
The results from a few thousand overseas and provisional ballots will be added to Lancaster County's election results and uploaded to the county's website by early next week, officials said Friday.
By law, counties count these votes after Election Day. Overseas and military ballots have an extra week to arrive at the elections office, and provisional ballots require additional checks to verify a person's eligibility to vote and make sure they haven't already voted.
Each county submits "unofficial returns" to the Department of State by the Tuesday following Election Day. In addition to all the votes counted and recorded so far, the report also includes totals for any ballots remaining to be counted.
The Lancaster County elections office will work through some 4,000 provisional ballots in the coming days, as well as about 750 overseas ballots, elections director Christa Miller said at a Board of Elections meeting Friday.
Challenges to overseas ballots were withdrawn ahead of the elections board meeting Friday. Lancaster was one of some 10 Pennsylvania counties in which pro-Trump election denial activists lodged challenges against overseas voters. All of them to date have been either withdrawn or dismissed.
Provisional ballots are used when an election worker can't verify a voter's eligibility in the precinct poll books. After the election, staff must research each ballot to ensure each voter is registered to vote and that they haven't already voted in the same election.
Miller said the county had not yet received 411 military and overseas ballots that had been requested. Ballots that come in at the Tuesday deadline may be counted the following day, Miller said.
Elections staff also have about 8,000 write-in votes to process, Miller said.
Process-wise, the unofficial returns are the vote totals the secretary of state uses to determine whether he calls for an automatic recount in any races. That happens when the unofficial returns show a race is separated by half of a percentage point.
This year, that's most likely to happen with the U.S. Senate race between incumbent Democrat Bob Casey and Republican David McCormick, who was ahead of Casey by 36,408 votes on Friday, according to the Department of State's website.
Casey's campaign believes the incumbent could come out on top once overseas and provisional ballots are counted.
There were about 16,000 overseas voters in Pennsylvania's 2024 election, and they favor Democrats by a factor of almost six to one, according to data from the Department of State.
There will be more provisional ballots than that, with 4,000 in Lancaster County alone, but it's unclear whether they will help Casey edge closer to McCormick.
