Pennsylvania Senate Race Turns on 21,000 Unscanned Mail-In Ballots

Pennsylvania's hotly contested U.S. Senate Republican primary race between Mehmet Oz and David McCormick could be decided by a "significant number" of unscanned Lancaster County mail-in ballots.

Lancaster County officials on primary day Tuesday said an estimated two-thirds of 21,000 mail-in ballots received could not be scanned due to a printing error, LancasterOnline reported.

McCormick led for most of the night, but Oz pulled ahead by about 2,000 votes, with more than 1.3 million ballots counted. Former Trump campaign senior adviser David Bossie told Newsmax the race likely was headed to a recount.

The printing issue with the mail-in ballots was discovered early Tuesday morning when officials began the pre-canvass process of opening and scanning ballots.

"Citizens deserve to have accurate results from elections, and they deserve to have them on election night, not days later," said Josh Parsons, vice chair of the county board of commissioners. "But because of this, we're not going to have final election results from these mail ballots for probably several days, so that is very, very frustrating to us."

All impacted ballots will be remarked and scanned, commissioners said, which is the process used last year when a similar error occurred with a different vendor.

Some of this year's ballots, printed by vendor NPC, had the wrong identification code, LancasterOnline reported. The error resulted in the ballots not being read by vote scanning machines.

"These types of errors are unacceptable and we hold the vendors responsible," commissioners said in the news release.

Nearly 28,000 mail-in ballots had been requested in Lancaster County, and voters had until 8 p.m. Tuesday to return their ballots to the county elections office.

Parsons said there was no evidence that any of the in-person ballots at polling places were affected by the error.

The commissioners issued a release saying that the incorrect printing happened after county elections staff had approved NPC's test ballots, which scanned properly, with the correct ID code, LancasterOnline reported.

Parsons and fellow Republican Commissioner Ray D'Agostino said fault lies with the 2019 law that expanded access to mail-in voting.

Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson Ellen Lyon said no other counties had reported similar issues.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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