This is what happens in a very close race but one that does not pit a Republican against a Democrat:
The legal fight for every single vote in Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary has begun.
Armies of attorneys representing David McCormick and Mehmet Oz, separated by a razor-thin margin in the ongoing vote count, had been descending on the state when a federal appeals court jolted the process Friday.
Shortly after 4 p.m., the court ruled that undated mail ballots from Lehigh County in last fall’s election should be counted. That sent counties and campaigns scrambling because state courts had previously held that Pennsylvania law required voters to date their ballots or have them thrown out.
Less than 90 minutes later, the McCormick campaign sent an email blast to lawyers for the state and all 67 counties.
“We trust that in light of the Third Circuit’s judgment you will advise your respective boards to count any and all absentee or mail-in ballots that were timely received but were set aside/not counted simply because those ballots lacked a voter-provided date on the outside of the envelope,” wrote attorney Ron Hicks. “To the extent you are not willing to provide this advice, we ask for a formal hearing before your boards on this issue.”
Hicks is one of Pennsylvania’s top Republican election lawyers. He and his firm, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, represented the campaign of then-President Donald Trump as he fought his loss in 2020. Hicks helped file a lawsuit aimed at stopping certification of the results in Pennsylvania before abruptly withdrawing from the case — and from representing Trump — days later.
Both the Oz and McCormick campaigns have brought in small armies of lawyers in recent days. But as they geared up for a bruising legal fight, they did not attack the legitimacy of the votes or the process of counting them, a dramatic contrast to the way Trump and his allies smeared the process in 2020.
As of Saturday afternoon, with more than 1.34 million votes counted in the race, Oz had 1,070 more counted votes than McCormick — a difference of less than 0.08% of the vote. By law, a difference of 0.5% or less would trigger a recount….
The fight over mail ballots now puts McCormick in the position of being a Republican defending a voting method that the GOP has spent the last two years attacking. Trump’s lies about election rigging and fraud have pushed Republicans to generally avoid voting by mail.