Pennsylvania’s elections in 2025 were marked more by administrative challenges than by disputes over results, according to Carter Walker, reporter for VoteBeat PA and Spotlight PA.
Luzerne County, which gained national attention in 2022 after running out of ballot paper in multiple precincts, continued to face operational issues. Walker said the county has stabilized under an election director with several years of experience, but minor errors persist.
“About a third of the precincts in the county had ran out of the ballot paper that they needed to run their elections,” Walker said. “It was a real big debacle…we just had so much turnover in this department that nobody really knew what the right steps were to take.”
Despite these challenges, he stressed that election outcomes were not affected. “The good news is the county is detecting these things and is making sure they don’t impact the outcome of the election,” Walker said, citing a case in which 31 male voters were mistakenly issued a second ballot, which was canceled to prevent double voting.
Structural complexities also complicate operations in Luzerne. Its home-rule government splits oversight between the county council and the elections board. “It seems pretty intuitive that it would make it more difficult for the people leading that office to deal with,” Walker said.
Chester County faced its own difficulties. Misprinted poll books left roughly 75,000 independent or third-party voters initially unable to access regular ballots, forcing many to use provisional ballots or wait until supplemental lists were available. High staff turnover contributed to these problems.
“The more turnover in general, the more problems you have,” Walker said. “If you lose people who know what it is that they’re doing, you lose that institutional knowledge and then it just makes errors more…prevalent.”
Walker also noted the lingering impact of 2020-era election distrust. “There is some faction…readily primed to believe there is manipulation going on in our elections or to distrust election administration in general,” he said.
Still, he remains confident in Pennsylvania’s election officials. “Election administrators are going to continue to do the job and do it well, barring the occasional human error that pops up. I’m not concerned that election administrators are going to have to start helping steal elections,” he said.
For Walker, the bigger challenge is public trust. “It’s hard to trust the process you’re not really seeing, and I worry more about if that trust deteriorates, what happens then,” he said.
Image: A sign urging voters to vote yes on judicial retention outside a polling place in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Election Day. Despite the amount of money spent on Pennsylvania’s judicial retention elections, many voters said they hadn’t seen much of the political messaging about them. (Carter Walker / Votebeat)