A stop-the-steal effort has been initiated by Pennsylvania Democrats intent on defying a court order in their bid to keep Dave McCormick from taking the seat of Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), who narrowly lost his reelection.

CNN investigative reporter Andy Kaczynski wrote on X that Democrats in Bucks County have voted to count provisional ballots in the race despite the Pennsylvania Supreme Court previously ruling they should remain uncounted.

“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” said Democratic county commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia as she voted Thursday to count ballots where voters did not submit the two legally required signatures on the outside of the ballot. “People violate laws anytime they want,” she continued. “So, for me, if I violate this law it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer details how state Democrats are racing to close the 25,000-vote gap that separates Casey and McCormick, a feat that will now rely on decisions by various county commissioners about how to address contested ballots. Up for grabs are around 80,000 ballots that may yet to be counted. Democrats are also acting out of expediency given deadlines around certifying the election and a looming recount.

McCormick and his allies fired back on Thursday, filing lawsuits in Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery, and Centre Counties to stop the counts of unsigned ballots as well as ballots returned without a postdate, making it impossible to determine whether they were received in time. Rather than play up the dispute and accuse Democrats of hypocritically trying to steal an election, Republicans are projecting confidence. “There is one inescapable truth to all of this,” said Mark Harris, lead strategist for the McCormick campaign. “When counting is done, Dave will be winning by tens of thousands of votes. It will not be close.”

As of Friday, lawyers for Casey and McCormick have spent more than 10 hours in court arguing the merits for and against counting the contested ballots. County commissioners themselves must then meet at length to discuss a strategy for revisiting which ballots might qualify. “It’s not always so simple to determine when a vote is legally cast and when there’s some gray area,” said Bob Harvie, another Democratic board member in Bucks County. In Chester County, for example, board members are wrangling over how to address provisional ballots that were accidentally cast by legally registered voters.

The county-by-county trench battle will not be the end of the fight, either. Both sides will have to gear up for hearings before the Common Pleas Court, which services appeals against election-related decisions. Pennsylvania Democrats underscored that their effort to fight McCormick’s lead is straightforward. “It’s the goal of the Democratic Party to count votes — not to not count votes,” Democratic attorney Dawn Burke told the Bucks County Board of Elections on Thursday.

Republicans have countered, saying some of Democrats’ efforts to count ballots have slipped into the absurd. They cite requests to count provisional ballots by voters who aren’t registered to vote in the county. “We think this is totally an extreme argument, it’s very outside the mainstream,” said James Fitzpatrick, an attorney for the McCormick campaign.