Election workers in Allegheny County on Wednesday joined their counterparts across the state as they launched a legally mandated recount in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race.

About 100 workers began processing hundreds of thousands of ballots on scanning machines at a warehouse on Pittsburgh’s North Side.

Abigail Gardner, spokeswoman for Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato, said everything has been “going smoothly” as staff work to retabulate more than 700,000 ballots.

The recount is required by state law since the race between incumbent Democrat Sen. Bob Casey and Republican businessman Dave McCormick is within 0.5 percentage point.

McCormick leads Casey by more than 16,000 votes. McCormick, who was declared the winner by The Associated Press, has 48.8% of the vote to Casey’s 48.6%.

Gardner didn’t have an estimate of how much the Allegheny County recount will cost. The expense will be reimbursed by the state.

Here at Allegheny County election warehouse where they have started the legally mandated recount for the PA senate race between Dave McCormick and Bob Casey. About 100 election staff are rescanning ballots pic.twitter.com/A7zMjFDqTU

— Ryan Deto (@RyanDeto) November 20, 2024

Counties are required to perform the recount on different machines than were used during the initial count.

Allegheny County is running in-person ballots on machines that originally tabulated mail-in ballots, and vice versa.

About 500,000 in-person ballots are being scanned on 10 machines that are usually used to count mail-in ballots.

Gardner said these machines can scan about 200 ballots per minute.

The county’s roughly 220,000 mail-in ballots are being counted on 96 machines that were used originally to count in-person ballots.

Gardner said the whole process is likely to run through Thursday.

The operation is smaller than the original count, when Allegheny County had over 220 workers in the warehouse.

“It’s a smaller operation than Election Day, but there are still a lot of people recounting over 700,000 ballots,” Gardner said. “Not a small task.”

A handful of observers from the McCormick and Casey campaigns were present at the warehouse.

Gardner said the county will publicize the official recount figures after all ballots are processed, likely on Thursday.

Westmoreland County Election Director Greg McCloskey said his county’s recount of more than 210,000 ballots is going as expected and there were no issues so far.

McCloskey said Westmoreland County’s recount started at 9 a.m. Wednesday and there are 20 staffers retabulating votes. The county is also switching machines to tabulate votes, similar to Allegheny County.

He said Westmoreland County’s recount will take over two days to complete.

“We expect to be done late tomorrow or early Friday,” McCloskey said.

Pennsylvania’s Department of State said recounts must be done by noon on Nov. 26 and results must be reported to the secretary of the commonwealth by noon on Nov. 27, the day they will be published.

The recount is expected to cost taxpayers more than $1 million statewide, according to the agency.

McCormick was involved in the most recent recount, in his Republican primary race for Senate against Mehmet Oz in 2022. Oz lost in the general election to Democratic U.S. Sen. John Fetterman.

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