Bob Casey isn’t conceding the US Senate race. But he’s not denying the integrity of the election results, either

PHILADELPHIA — As Pennsylvania’s razor-thin U.S. Senate race heads to a recount, allies of President-elect Donald Trump have claimed Sen. Bob Casey is working to steal an election, drawing false parallels between Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and Casey’s decision not to concede in his reelection bid as votes are tabulated.

But there’s a key difference between the two scenarios.

Casey, the three-term Democratic incumbent, is using the system’s legal channels to wait out vote tabulation and fight to have ballots counted, even as it may not go his way. The Associated Press called the Senate race for Republican Dave McCormick on Nov. 7, concluding that although ballots were still being tallied, Casey no longer had a viable path to victory.

That’s a stark contrast to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election by seeking to exclude millions of votes cast legally in Pennsylvania. To this day, Trump has not conceded his loss to President Joe Biden four years ago, and he was indicted for his efforts to overturn the results.

As the recount moves forward, Republicans have increasingly pointed to decisions from Democratic-led election boards to count undated ballots, which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said twice this year should not be counted in this election, as evidence of a purported effort to dishonestly tip the vote count in Casey’s favor.

While the boards’ decisions — including in Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery and Centre counties — clearly run counter to the state court’s orders, they are consistent with local officials’ preexisting positions that those ballots should be counted, and the boards have not explicitly tied their reasoning to Casey’s reelection bid. McCormick’s campaign has filed several lawsuits to overturn the decisions, including Friday’s lawsuit against the Philadelphia city commissioners, who chose to include more than 600 ballots submitted by voters who had failed to date or incorrectly dated the outer envelopes, as required by state law

Last week, the right-wing Fair Election Fund placed a TV ad calling on Casey to concede, using the senator’s own words from 2020 calling on Trump to do the same after he lost to Biden.

But the current state of the Pennsylvania Senate race bears few similarities to 2020. Though he has not conceded, Casey has not denied the legitimacy of the election’s results as they stand.

Rather, he is arguing that every vote in the state should be counted and that those outstanding votes could change things — even as his chances of prevailing look increasingly less likely.

While the race is headed to a recount, Casey trails by more than 20,000 votes, a margin too large for the recount to have a high chance of changing the outcome of the race.

“Casey’s not claiming the election was rigged, right?” said Matthew Jordan, a media and film studies professor and news literacy expert at Pennsylvania State University. “Casey’s just saying, ‘Be patient.'”

When asked Thursday if there are enough votes for him to overtake McCormick’s lead in the Senate race, Casey replied: “I don’t know. I just want to make sure that we count every vote.”

A typical process drawing extra attention

In past elections, when Casey won his races handily, Casey’s campaign and Democrats broadly had appeared before local boards of election across Pennsylvania, fighting for provisional ballots — which voters cast when the county board of elections needs to determine whether someone is eligible to vote — to be counted. The process is standard in every election. But it has earned extra attention as the Senate race remains close.

While Casey’s campaign is fighting to have as many ballots counted as possible, it is up to local boards of election and courts to decide which ballots to include. Democrats’ arguments have focused on base questions of whether the law does or does not bar a ballot from being counted.

The ballots in question are all legally cast provisional and mail ballots, but they require additional review to determine whether they meet all the qualifications to count.

That’s a different situation from 2020, when Trump’s campaign filed dozens of frivolous lawsuits that lacked evidence and made broad, bombastic claims of voter fraud.

Still, the Republican pressure campaign for Casey to concede is mounting. On Friday, both Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley and U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., posted unfounded claims to X that decisions by Pennsylvania’s local boards of elections to count undated ballots were part of an effort by Democrats to steal the election from McCormick.

There is no evidence that is true.

Whatley’s and Cotton’s posts referred predominantly to decisions in four Pennsylvania counties to count undated ballots.

While Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court ruled earlier this year that undated ballots should be counted, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later blocked that decision, issuing two orders earlier this year that undated ballots should not be counted in this election.

Democrats have long argued that excluding those ballots violates the constitutional rights of those voters. And board members cited concern with rejecting otherwise validly cast ballots when voting to count them. Democrats are more likely to vote by mail, and counting those ballots might disproportionately benefit Casey. But county officials did not mention Casey’s reelection bid when voting to count the ballots.

Even if the additional undated ballots are counted — despite active court challenges from the RNC — they would not come close to being enough to close the gap between Casey and McCormick.

The boards’ decision, however, was unusual, said Derek Muller, an election-law expert at the University of Notre Dame.

“In theory, the board should just exclude the ballots and then let the contestant go sue,” Muller said. “… They’re sort of flipping it around and essentially forcing the RNC to be the one making that as a contestee in these cases.”

The approach, Muller added, is “heightening this attention on election officials” and could get “courts involved in a way that we probably don’t want to see courts step in.”

An impatient, ‘fan culture’ stacked against Bob Casey online

Trump’s unfounded rhetoric about election fraud in 2020 primed his audience to be receptive to similar messaging. And Trump began laying similar groundwork on Election Day this month, falsely claiming there was “massive cheating” in Philadelphia, before the race later shifted in his favor.

Four years ago, Trump and others feverishly and falsely claimed there was cheating and widespread election fraud, coining the slogan and hashtag “Stop the Steal.” The words and actions of the then-president and his loyalists culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol while Congress was attempting to certify the results to the 2020 election.

Patience for election results is hard to find in today’s fast-paced digital culture, as shown in voters’ expectations — “that expectation that anything that is not immediate is somehow problematic” — for races to be called quickly, Jordan said.

And as Casey delays on conceding, users online are posting often incorrect information to support their GOP “tribe,” playing an active role in “fan culture,” Jordan said.

“I think there are people who are fans of the MAGA brand and whatnot, who will do whatever they can to sell that product, do whatever they can to sell that worldview,” he said.

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(Staff writer Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this article.)

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