Harrisburg, PA – Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt certified the results of Pennsylvania’s 2025 municipal election today after county officials confirmed the accuracy of their reported results through two pre-certification audits.
“After reviewing the certified results from all 67 counties, I have formally certified the outcome of the Nov. 4 municipal election,” Schmidt said. “I extend my thanks to county election officials, who spent the last few weeks diligently counting eligible votes and confirming that Pennsylvania held yet another free, fair, safe, and secure election.”
Roughly 42.45% of registered Pennsylvania voters cast a ballot in the November election, which is well above the 36.77% turnout for the 2023 municipal election.
Schmidt emphasized that counties again successfully conducted two audits of their vote tallies before they certified their results.
“Both audits confirmed the accuracy of the reported results, again showing Pennsylvanians that they can have confidence in the accuracy and integrity of our electoral system,” Schmidt said.
The two audits take different approaches to reach the same goal: confirming whether all results have been reported correctly.
One audit is a statutorily required statistical recount in each county of a random sample of at least 2% of all ballots cast – or 2,000 ballots, whichever is fewer. All counties must perform this audit after every election.
The other is a statistically based risk-limiting audit, known as an RLA. RLAs involve randomly chosen counties hand-tallying votes for one randomly chosen statewide race in randomly selected batches of ballots.
Demonstrating the Shapiro Administration’s continued commitment to transparency in election administration, the Department livestreamed the random contest selection for this RLA on social media, then one week later livestreamed the process to produce a random 20-digit number used to identify which counties were selected to audit which batches of ballots.
In total, auditors in nine counties manually reviewed 4,343 ballots and determined the reported outcome of the randomly selected retention contest for Superior Court Judge Alice Beck Dubow was correct.
Learn more about how Pennsylvania verifies the results of every election at vote.pa.gov/audits. Official vote returns for all of November’s statewide races are on the Department’s website.
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Editor’s note: These counties were randomly selected to complete the RLA:
- Allegheny
- Bucks
- Centre
- Chester
- Erie
- Luzerne
- Northampton
- Philadelphia
- Wayne