If I have to, I'll explain. Promise. But the first important thing to know is that this is not a count tonight; it's unofficial and does not include absentee or provisional ballots. The formal count begins Friday, & overseas/military absentees have until next Tues to come in.
Ok, thread time.
1. Almost all the voting in these counties is done on touchscreen machines. Westmoreland County has a mix of touchscreen and optical scan. So a recount won't change things much -- only the Westmoreland paper ballots & absentees/provisionals could.
1. Almost all the voting in these counties is done on touchscreen machines. Westmoreland County has a mix of touchscreen and optical scan. So a recount won't change things much -- only the Westmoreland paper ballots & absentees/provisionals could.
2. Again, to stress: this isn't the official count. This is an informal count. Absentees/provisionals have not been counted yet. Wait until Friday on the former; on the latter voters have a week to verify their eligibility still.
3. Firiday is when the real fun starts all over the place, but again the only issues of interpretation are with the paper ballots, which is a small portion of the total. And the UOCAVA votes (overseas & military) can break both ways.
4. *After the county boards of election do their iniital count, particular decisions they make can be appealed back to the county boards of elections. Those decisions, in turn, can be appealed to the court of common pleas.
5. And then, yes, all the machines can be judicially recanvassed/recounted upon petiitions duly filed. But most of this is just arithmetic, not staring at hanging chads.
6. If you've come this far and need the bio info, I've lawyered three PA races in the past four years which were decided by zero-1 votes. Yes, two of them were ties and my client won the drawing of lots. So I've been deep in the weeds on this stuff.
7. While this is a single-race ballot, ballots contained "straight ticket" and candidate options. Here's Allegheny's. If a voter enters conflicting info on a paper ballot (machines won't allow it), the candidate selection governs. 
8. Want to get super-nerdy on how paper ballots are read? PA's rules are here. pabulletin.com/secure/data/vo… All sorts of examples.
9. If I had to guess, I bet the absentees push things further in Conor's direction. I trust the @AlleghenyDems to have done their job to ensure eligible absentee voters knew and exercised their rights.
10. As a reminder: Pennsylvania doesn't have early voting. We don't have no-excuse absentee voting. Only voters who know they'll be out-of-town for all of Election Day, or are physically unable to make it to the polls, can vote absentee.
11. This is seriously weird for me. As my wife just said, this is my moment of being Marissa Tomei and being the only person on Twitter who knows a lot about which cars have positraction.
12. PA has a lot of well-trained Democratic recount lawyers. I'm just one. @kevin_greenberg is another. There are several in Pgh. If needed, we got this.
13. As Mark Wolosik, legendary Allegheny County elections chief just explained on CNN, the 3000+ absentees in the county should be counted by 11:15pm or so.
14. As he just alluded, Rick Saccone's first two races were nailbiters as well. HD-39, 2010 and 2012:
15. (After 2012, the district was gerrymandered to his advantage. Due to litigation in which I was involved in a side capacity, the initial 2011 state legislative map was declared unconstitutional under state constitutional law. So they tried again.)
16. If you've made it this far, you know that things have changed as to absentee ballots and the informal counts *are* happening tonight. I've worked with the election division staffs in 3/4 of these counties, and I know they're capable even after a long, long day.
17. True story: last year, Westmoreland County elections head Beth Lechmann was able to change machine ballots as to a mis-nominated school board candidate which no one has spotted until the Thursday before Election Day. Remarkably hard work.
18. Absolutely agreed with @ElectProject @DKElections that based on my observations, absentees in PA tend to break slightly more D than the overall vote. Even as to overseas/military, it's more "college student semester abroad" than armed forces on the front lines.
19. One last note for now: it was almost exactly 5 months ago tonight that we started talking through the rules/procedures for a public Dem party caucus to select a nominee for this special election. Hard to describe how it feels to have gone from there to a night like this.
Ok, one more: If you're Rick Saccone, how the hell can you now motivate people to gather the 1000 valid signatures you need (i.e., get 2000-3000, minimum) by next Tuesday to get on the PA-14 primary ballot?
