Casey’s concession comes more than two weeks after Election Day, as a grindingly slow ballot-counting process became a spectacle of hours-long election board meetings, social media outrage, lawsuits and accusations that some county officials were openly flouting the law.
Republicans had been claiming that Democrats were trying to steal McCormick’s seat by counting “illegal votes.” Casey’s campaign had accused of Republicans of trying to block enough legitimate votes to prevent him from pulling ahead and winning.
In a statement, Casey, a stalwart of Pennsylvania’s Democratic establishment and the state's longest serving Democrat ever in the Senate, said he had just called McCormick to congratulate him.
The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on Nov. 7, concluding that not enough ballots remained to be counted in areas Casey was winning for him to take the lead.
As of Thursday, McCormick led by about 16,000 votes out of almost 7 million ballots counted.
That was well within the 0.5% margin threshold to trigger an automatic statewide recount under Pennsylvania law.
But no election official expected a recount to change more than a couple hundred votes or so, and Pennsylvania's highest court dealt Casey a blow when it refused efforts to allow counties to count mail-in ballots that lacked a correct handwritten date on the return envelope.
Casey in the meantime had won efforts to get counties to tabulate thousands of provisional ballots that might otherwise have been thrown out because of an error by an election worker. That included voters whose registrations hadn't been properly processed, the campaign said.
But the campaign lost other efforts to get counties to count ballots that were disqualified over garden-variety errors that voters made, like not signing a provisional ballot in two places or not putting the ballot into an inner “secrecy” envelope.
Republicans will have a 53-47 majority next year in the U.S. Senate.
