Ugly election administration scene and legal dispute playing out in Pennsylvania, here reported by Katie Bernard, Jeremy Roebuck, Sean Collins Walsh, and Fallon Roth at the Philadelphia Inquirer:

It’s been a week since the Associated Press called Pennsylvania’s tight Senate race for Dave McCormick, concluding the Republican had closed off any viable path for Democratic Sen. Bob Casey to still eke out a win.

But their campaigns are still battling it out in counties and in court.

With certification deadlines and a statewide recount looming, the candidates are locked in a county-by-county trench battle over small tranches of contested provisional ballots left to be counted across the state. Statewide, officials estimated fewer than 80,000 of the ballots cast — or less than 2% of the vote — remained outstanding as of Thursday.

For Casey, who has resisted conceding as remaining votes are counted, those small county-level fights — sometimes over just dozens of ballots — offer his last, best chance to make up his roughly 25,000-vote deficit in the race.

Though closing the gap remains a long shot, Casey’s insistence has also reignited long-standing disputes between Republicans and Democrats over which votes should be counted and which should be rejected — and prompted some counties to openly defy recent rulings from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” said Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, as she cast a vote Thursday to count certain deficient provisional ballots previously barred by court order, where voters did not sign in one of two necessary boxes.

“People violate laws any time they want,” she said. “So, for me, if I violate this law it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”

. . .

Meanwhile, a separate fight is brewing over the fate of some of the most litigated ballots in the state — mail ballots submitted without a date or with the wrong date written on the outer envelope.

Despite two earlier rulings from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that those ballots should be rejected in this year’s election, officials in Bucks, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and Centre Counties have bucked that order and voted in recent days to include them.

Though those openly defiant decisions will almost certainly be overturned in court, they continue a recent pattern by majority commissioners in all four counties to vote for the inclusion of undated ballots. None of the commissioners who supported their inclusion couched their votes in terms of the ongoing Senate race.