In GOP vs. GOP recount, Pennsylvania officials battle to restore trust

Nearly two hours into the meeting, Berks County Commissioner Kevin Barnhardt loses his cool. 

Mr. Barnhardt and his fellow commissioners had gathered to hear complaints about Pennsylvania’s Republican primary election, in which Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz and former hedge fund CEO David McCormick are currently separated by fewer than 1,000 votes. With a recount beginning June 1, both campaigns have been clawing at the margins – as evidenced by the two lawyers shuffling their stacks of paper-clipped files before Berks’ top election officials.

The first complaint has to do with extended poll hours. After some precincts had equipment trouble, a judge ruled that county polling stations would stay open one hour later. Not fair, says a lawyer with the McCormick campaign – polls were only supposed to be open for 13 hours. (Of note: In-person ballots have slightly favored Dr. Oz.)

The next complaint is over several hundred absentee ballots that were returned on time but without a date on the envelope. Counting them would clearly violate the rules, says a lawyer with the Oz campaign, since voters were instructed to date their envelopes. (Mail-in ballots have slightly favored Mr. McCormick.) 

But when the discussion turns to the appropriate distance for observers to witness election employees at work, Mr. Barnhardt’s patience finally wears out. 

“It’s gotten to the point of lunacy with some of these things we’re discussing,” he erupts. “The ludicrousness ... of considering plugging in a camera similar to what ESPN does at football games is asinine.”

“This is not the Democrats and Republicans; it’s the Republicans demanding changes,” Mr. Barnhardt, the sole Democrat on the board, adds. “If you think you’re going to stand there and look at someone’s envelope and look at someone’s ballot – forget about it.’”  

As Pennsylvania kicks off its statewide recount and works through court challenges surrounding the razor-thin GOP Senate race, election officials here, as elsewhere, are managing these efforts against an unprecedented backdrop – one in which even mundane clerical tasks are seen through a lens of deep distrust in the electoral process.

Former President Donald Trump’s relentless claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent – claims that were refuted by his own attorney general and top security officials, along with more than 60 court rulings upholding Joe Biden’s victory – have pushed Republican voters’ trust in U.S. elections to record lows. During the current cycle, questions of “election integrity” have shaped Republican primaries, with scores of candidates promising to fix what they allege, contrary to evidence, is a broken system.

Mr. Trump’s fraud claims have already led many states to pass new laws tightening voting procedures. Even more impactful, however, may be the extent to which they have primed many GOP voters and officials to question election results going forward – particularly when a contest is close, and even when it is solely between Republicans, as is the case in Pennsylvania.

If the campaigns continue to foment distrust in the results, that could have serious consequences in the battleground state, seen as crucial to control of the Senate. The Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, won his primary handily, and the GOP will need its voters in the fall.

“[Republican voters] have been lied to for so long and told repeatedly that what is a good election process is bad,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that works with election officials from both parties to improve election administration. “You can understand how they would doubt elections.”

Here in Berks County, officials say the atmosphere of distrust has made far it more difficult for them to do their jobs, even as the critical nature of those jobs has been underscored. 

“They get hung up on, they get sworn at – but they still come in every day,” says Mr. Barnhardt in his office after the meeting, speaking of employees counting ballots several floors below. “They’re trying in some small way to restore faith in the voting process.”  

Too close to call

In the Election Services office for Berks, one of Pennsylvania’s most populous counties, paper ballots are sorted into towering columns of blue boxes. The 12 full-time employees, along with other workers filling in during the tabulation process, move seamlessly around the stacks.  

Most decline to speak on the record, citing fear of harassment from their own community – an increasingly common problem. According to a poll commissioned by the Brennan Center, 1 in 3 elections officials now say they feel unsafe in their jobs, and 1 in 5 cite threats to their lives as a job-related concern. 

Berks County hired a new elections director in February, its third since 2020. Before 2020, Mr. Barnhardt had worked with one director during his entire 15-year tenure as commissioner. Pennsylvania officials say this is a statewide trend, estimating that more than 30 counties have lost their elections directors over the past two years. 

Not only are these workers still facing harassment over the 2020 elections – a county employee says the office still fields calls from voters demanding they overturn the results – but they are also facing new scrutiny, and now the pressure of a statewide recount.

While Lieutenant Governor Fetterman won the Democratic Senate primary with almost 60% of the vote on May 17, the Republican race for Pennsylvania’s open seat has been hotly contested. After Mr. Trump’s initial endorsee, Sean Parnell, dropped out in November amid domestic abuse allegations, the race closed in around former TV show host Dr. Oz and Mr. McCormick, an Army veteran and former head of the investment company Bridgewater Associates.

On Election Day, after a turnout of more than 1.3 million votes, the race was too close to call. By May 26, the margin between Dr. Oz and Mr. McCormick had shrunk to 922 votes, triggering a statewide recount. 

In a post on his social media site Truth Social the day after the election, Mr. Trump urged Dr. Oz to “declare victory,” adding that doing so would make it “much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they ‘just happened to find.’” While he held off doing so at first, Dr. Oz released a video on Twitter Friday saying he has earned “the presumptive Republican nomination for the United States Senate.” 

The move reminded many here of Mr. Trump claiming victory on election night in 2020, well before all mail-in ballots had been tabulated. 

“Republicans just cry a lot if they don’t win,” says Patty Blatt, a Democratic voter with a Biden 2020 flag still hanging from her porch outside Reading. “This all just sounds like the Republican calling card at this point.” 

“The system is working exactly as it should”

In a call with reporters Tuesday, a senior official with the McCormick campaign expressed a lack of confidence in the recount, complaining about slow reporting of results in the original tally – which isn’t finished in many parts of the state, even as the recount begins. 

“We’re doing a recount of a count that we don’t know the results of yet,” said the official. 

The McCormick campaign has filed a lawsuit against election officials, arguing for almost four hours in court on Tuesday that 860 mail-in ballots missing a date on the exterior envelope should be counted because they were “indisputably submitted on time,” as evidenced by the stamp upon receipt. After the hearing, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency stay while it decides if it will hear an appeal. 

Dr. Oz’s lawyers contend that counting these 860 undated ballots would be “changing the rules” in the middle of an election – a decision that would further undermine voters’ confidence in the process. Berks County Commissioner Christian Leinbach, one of Mr. Barnhardt’s two Republican colleagues, seems to echo this view during the meeting with lawyers for the two campaigns.

“We’re in a very difficult era for U.S. elections. More and more of what is ultimately deciding elections is not the vote or necessarily the law, but rather the results of litigation,” says Mr. Leinbach. “This is troubling, and potentially dangerous for the republic.”

But litigation isn’t actually a problem, counters Mr. Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. While tedious and time-consuming, the automatic recount and ongoing court cases in Pennsylvania are all legitimate parts of the democratic process that serve to reinforce trust in results. The problem is the politicians who have encouraged voters to question these standard electoral procedures.

“We have had multiple years of delegitimization of a secure process by a losing candidate, and now voters are being misled into thinking something is awry,” says Mr. Becker. “This is an election with a very narrow margin, and the system is working exactly as it should.” 

Michael Taylor, acting solicitor for Chester County’s GOP, agrees that the current drama in Pennsylvania mostly reflects the closeness of the Senate race. But he also believes the 2020 election has colored how Republican voters see the entire process. 

Mr. Taylor expresses a view repeated by many local officials: He believes the election results in his jurisdiction were fair and valid, and any claims to the contrary simply reflect voters’ lack of understanding of the process. But that doesn’t mean fraud didn’t take place in a different part of the state – or country. 

“The questioning of mail-in ballots greatly stems from 2020. [Voters] saw what happened, and it gave them all these questions,” says Mr. Taylor.

He adds that almost all of the Chester County GOP meetings now include voters who come and ask procedural questions for upward of an hour. “We had a bunch of [poll] watchers come in for this election, and I tell each of them that come in that you have two jobs: If you see something, say something, but more importantly, then go back out to your friends and family and talk about your experience so they understand.” 

But then he adds another directive. 

“I also said to the watchers who came in: Think of this as a practice round for November, when there are more ballots – and the pressure is greater.”