Control of the Pennsylvania state House has come down to a single district in Cambria County, where the fate of a “blue dog” Democrat is slowly coming into focus as thousands of ballots are counted by hand.
Rep. Frank Burns, a Democrat who first won Pennsylvania’s 72nd House District in 2008, had a 57% to 43% advantage over Republican Amy Bradley as of 5 p.m. Wednesday.
And yet, the winner remains unclear, as more than half of vote remain to be counted.
The reason for the delay: Poll workers in the county found Tuesday morning their scanners could not correctly read voters’ choices.
At a press conference Tuesday evening, Cambria County Commissioner Scott Hunt said incorrectly printed ballots were to blame — not malfunctioning software, as officials initially believed.
A judge extended voting hours in the county until 10 p.m. Tuesday. Any ballot cast between 8 and 10 p.m. in the county was marked as provisional and will be subject to additional eligibility scrutiny.
Corrected ballots arrived later in the day but, in the meantime, precincts continued to collect ballots and store them in secure boxes, according to Hunt. Those are now being hand-counted.
The Cambria County Board of Commissioners did not respond to questions about when the vote might be fully tallied. Within seven days of the election, the county board of elections will decide which provisional voters are eligible.
If Burns pulls through, Democrats will keep their 102 to 101 majority and get a much needed break after let-down performances in the presidential, U.S. Senate and state row office races.
Burns won the district 55% to 45% in 2022, but there’s clearly concern among Democrats for his electoral safety. At least $3.4 million was spent to defend Burns — the most expensive Pennsylvania House race, Spotlight PA reported — in a district that favored Trump by 30 percentage points in 2020.
A Bradley victory would bring a Republican takeover of the Legislature after two years without controlling the state House.
The GOP locked up the state Senate and is headed toward a two- or three-seat majority in the 50-member upper chamber. Half of state Senate seats go up for grabs every two years.
Dan Mallinson, a professor of public policy and administration at Penn State University, said the consequences of either side winning the state House are real, but not earth shattering.
Budgets negotiations could be most impacted, he said, with Gov. Josh Shapiro losing substantial leverage without his party in charge of the House. A unified Republican legislature also could circumvent Shapiro’s veto with constitutional amendments, which must pass both chambers of the General Assembly two sessions in a row and get voter approval through a referendum.
In a backlash to pandemic restrictions, Pennsylvania voters in 2021 curbed then-Gov. Tom Wolf’s emergency powers through this process. An overwhelming majority of proposed amendments never make it to a referendum, though.
“At the end of the day, regardless of which (party), it’s still divided government, and in divided government it’s still harder to get things passed,” Mallinson said.
These down-to-the-wire fights for control of the House are a consequence of how the state’s districts are drawn, he added, making around just half a dozen seats reasonably competitive each cycle.
And while the electorate does change over time, Mallinson doesn’t expect many more battleground seats to emerge until districts are made up again after the 2030 federal census.
“Until there’s another redraw, I would expect those demographics changes to still only affect a handful of districts,” he said.