We could find out Wednesday who wins the last two Pa. state House races — and the majority
With almost all votes counted across Pennsylvania, control of the state House has come down to two districts in Bucks and Montgomery Counties.
The campaign for control of the Pennsylvania state House could be decided Wednesday.
With almost all votes counted across Pennsylvania, the fate of the state House has come down to two districts in Bucks and Montgomery Counties. Candidates in both uncalled races are separated by razor-thin margins, with a few hundred votes left to count.
At stake is a majority in the House — a consequential prize after Republicans held the state Senate and Democrat Josh Shapiro won the governor’s race. If Republicans retain control of both chambers, they can continue advancing constitutional amendments to work around Shapiro in areas including abortion and voting rights — avoiding the governor’s veto pen. If Democrats win, they’ll have more power to push forward their agenda after years of being in the minority.
Democrats have won 101 of the 203 total House seats so far and Republicans have won 100. A majority requires 102 seats.
Bucks and Montgomery Counties are counting the bulk of the remaining votes Wednesday. Those results could be enough to know the winner of one or both districts — even before the last ballots are tallied in the days afterward.
Here’s what’s happening in the pivotal last two districts.
Which districts are left?
The 151st District in Montgomery County and the 142nd District in Bucks County, both of which are currently held by Republicans.
In the 142nd District, Democrat Mark Moffa, vice president of the Penndel Borough Council, slightly trails Republican Joe Hogan, a former congressional staffer. The district includes Penndel, Langhorne, Lower Southampton, and parts of Middletown Township. The seat was left open by Republican Rep. Frank Farry, who won a state Senate seat.
And in the 151st District, Republican Rep. Todd Stephens, a six-term incumbent, has a slight lead over Democrat Melissa Cerrato, a former state legislative staffer. The district includes parts of Horsham, Montgomery Township, Upper Dublin and Ambler.
How close are the elections?
Both races are very close.
In the 142nd District, Hogan had 114 more votes counted than Moffa did as of Monday afternoon. Those votes are reflected in Monday’s update to the unofficial results.
In the 151st District, Stephens had 12 more votes counted than Cerrato did as of Friday afternoon, the last time local elections officials released an updated tally.
When will we know the winners?
It depends on a few things.
Both counties will begin counting a significant portion of the remaining votes Wednesday. There will likely be more than 200 votes processed and counted in each.
That will leave just a few dozen, in both races, that the county boards of elections had voted to count but Democrats or Republicans had challenged.
Neither county will count the challenged ballots Wednesday. It’s still possible that Wednesday’s updates will make the winners clear: If the margin is large enough that the remaining ballots can’t change it, the candidates and parties would likely drop their challenges to those votes.
But if Wednesday’s results leave intact razor-thin margins that could be changed by the final challenged ballots, expect the campaigns and parties to quickly take those ballots to court, suing to either count or reject them, depending on which side they’re on.
Why are these races so close?
While the Philadelphia suburbs have become increasingly blue over the past two decades, some districts remain very purple, and are among the most critical swing areas in the state.
Joe Biden narrowly won Bucks County in 2020, but Republicans swept all five of the county’s House districts. And last year, the GOP won all the countywide row offices.
Democrats, who felt confident this year that they could flip some seats because of newly drawn legislative districts, poured resources into Bucks — and saw some success.
Two other Democrats flipped seats that had been previously held by the GOP. In the 144th District, which includes Warminster and Warrington, Democrat Brian Munroe unseated Republican Rep. Todd Polinchock by less than 500 votes.
And in the 29th District, which includes swaths of Doylestown, Solebury, and Buckingham, Democrat Tim Brennan prevailed over Republican Diane Smith. The seat was left open by Republican Rep. Meghan Schroeder, who did not seek reelection.
As for the Montgomery County race, Democrats and their allies have for years spent millions trying to unseat Stephens. Two years ago, they spent about $900,000, which was four times what Republicans spent, according to AdImpact. Stephens won by seven percentage points.
He has held on despite being repeatedly targeted, and even as Montgomery County has become one of the state’s most reliable Democratic strongholds. Biden won the district with more than 60% of the vote.
Stephens has appealed to independents and moderate Democrats. He’s been endorsed by unions, gun-control advocates, and environmentalists. Planned Parenthood’s political arm in Pennsylvania endorsed Stephens in 2018 and 2020 — he has voted against abortion restrictions — but the group didn’t endorse any Pennsylvania Republicans this year following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Cerrato made the issue a key component of her campaign, telling voters that even if Stephens is not anti-abortion himself, he is a member of the party that has advanced legislation in Harrisburg aimed at restricting access.
How many votes are left to count in Pennsylvania’s 151st state House district?
There are a few hundred more votes left in the 151st District, though some of them will be rejected and others won’t be counted for the state House race. Lee Soltysiak, Montgomery County’s chief operating officer and chief clerk, provided a breakdown.
The biggest batch left are 249 provisional ballots. Provisional ballots are last-chance paper ballots that are used at polling places when poll workers are unable to verify that someone should be allowed to vote. Instead of letting them cast a normal ballot, workers give paper ballots that are then set aside for elections officials to research.
If, for example, a poll worker couldn’t find the voter in the poll books, county staff will check whether the voter was somehow missing from the poll books, or maybe the poll worker just missed them, or the voter was at the wrong polling place. If a voter already had a mail ballot counted, the provisional ballot would be rejected.
The district has 32 mail ballots that were initially “ID not verified”, which means voters didn’t provide identification when requesting the ballot or officials were unable to confirm the voters’ identities. That’s normal: State law requires counties to send ballots to voters even if their identity hasn’t been confirmed yet, but voters have until the Monday six days after Election Day to resolve the issue.
Counties only accept and count the ballots of voters whose identities are confirmed, and Montgomery County elections officials provided the lists to the campaigns and parties to chase down those voters. There were 49 “ID not verified” ballots, of which 32 voters provided ID and will be counted; the remaining 17 are to be rejected.
There are about three dozen military and overseas ballots. Those ballots, which are known as UOCAVA votes for the federal law that governs them, were received in the mail through Tuesday.
That’s more than 300 votes that could potentially be counted, but the real number will be smaller. Some of the 249 provisional ballots will be rejected because the person was ineligible to vote or, for example, already voted by mail. And if someone voted at the wrong polling place in a different district, only the races in which they were actually eligible to vote, like the statewide races, would count for that voter. (Some voters also don’t vote in every race.)
How many votes are left to count in Pennsylvania’s 142nd state House district?
Fewer than 500 ballots are left to count in the district, though some will be rejected.
The biggest batch left is 275 provisional ballots, according to James O’Malley, a spokesperson for the county.
There are also 156 mail ballots that were segregated and not counted because they have various defects. Some were unsigned, undated, or were “naked ballots” missing the inner secrecy envelope.
In addition, the county sent out 32 ballots to military and overseas voters.
How much can the vote counts change?
The results have changed over time and will continue to as the final votes are counted.
For example, Moffa had been up two votes over Hogan for several days until Bucks County elections officials released additional results from in-person voting on Monday. In Montgomery County, Stephens had been 26 votes above Cerrato until an update Thursday shrunk that to 14 votes, and then 12 on Friday.
As the final votes come in, they might expand the gaps between candidates, narrow them even more, or change which person has more of the counted vote. That’s a normal phenomenon as every last vote is counted.
