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If it feels like Pennsylvania voters are constantly going to the polls, it’s not your imagination.
According to data from Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan online political encyclopedia, Pennsylvania has held 47 special elections for vacant state legislative and congressional seats since 2017, including two being held Tuesday for state House seats in Allegheny and Lehigh counties. That’s more than in any other state over that period.
It’s not clear why Pennsylvania has had so many special elections, though observers have pointed to the state’s large full-time legislature as a possible factor. But what’s more clear is the cost. Many of those special elections were held on different days from normal primary or general elections, increasing the burden for administrators and costing taxpayers millions of extra dollars.
Legislators have proposed bills aimed at reducing those costs, but none have passed.
Special elections can be a burden
In recent years, special elections in Pennsylvania have been especially high-stakes, at least in the state House. Democrats have controlled the chamber since they won a narrow one-seat majority in the 2022 election, but the House majority has technically been up for grabs in 12 special elections since then, including the two on Tuesday, although most of them were not competitive.
Two such elections came in Philadelphia in September 2024. Two Democratic representatives had resigned in July, temporarily leaving the state House with 101 Republicans and 100 Democrats. Under House rules, though, Democrats retained control until the special elections could be held. (Democrats won both seats unopposed.)
Seth Bluestein, a city commissioner in Philadelphia, said he understands from the legislature’s perspective why those special elections needed to be held quickly. But, he said, “from an election administration standpoint, to hold an election less than two months before a general when the election could have been on the same ballot was frustrating.”
Even though special elections typically draw fewer voters than primary or general elections, counties must go through the same steps to prepare for them. Machines need to be tested, pollbooks need to be printed, and mail ballots need to be sent out. Holding special elections on a non-regularly scheduled election date can also make finding polling places and poll workers more difficult, Bluestein said.
“The biggest problem for that timing was the staff didn’t really get a break going into the general,” he said. “There was no break there for them to recover.”
It also costs money to hold a special election. By law, the Pennsylvania Department of State must reimburse counties for special elections for the state legislature. Twenty-three of the 47 special elections since 2017 have fallen on a primary or general election day (when voting was already supposed to happen anyway), were congressional special elections, which the state doesn’t pay for, or were not submitted to the state for reimbursement. But the remaining 22 special elections (not counting today’s) have cost the state more than $4.4 million, according to data from the department.
That may not represent the full cost to taxpayers, however, as the state may not have covered every cost of those elections.
In the two September 2024 elections, Bluestein said the $1.5 million the state paid back to the city represented about two-thirds of the cost of the elections. That’s in part because some materials used in the special elections were also used in the general election less than two months later, and therefore were not eligible for reimbursement.
Not the only option, but little appetite for change
Special elections are not the only way states fill legislative vacancies. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, about half of states appoint, not elect, new legislators to fill the term until the next election. These appointments are usually made by the governor or the political party of the legislator who left the seat vacant.
Even states that do use special elections can have different laws governing their timing. Pennsylvania requires a special election to be called within 10 days of a seat becoming vacant, and the special election must take place within 60 days of the call. If a regularly scheduled election falls in that 60-day window, that’s when the election is held — that’s often not the case, though, forcing elections to be held on more random dates.
But Louisiana, for example, only calls a special election if six months or more remain in the term; otherwise, the vacancy is filled at the next general election. If that were the law in Pennsylvania, the two special elections in Philadelphia would not have taken place, as those offices were also on the November ballot.
Katy Owens Hubler, director of elections and redistricting at NCSL, said Pennsylvania’s full-time legislature could contribute to the high number of special elections in the state.
Some states also limit which days in the year a special election can be held.
“I think part of the intent of that is to relieve the [administrative] burden a little bit,” she said. “Having to have a couple of special elections in September of a big election year — that’s hard, and I’m sure it’s confusing for voters too.”
It’s unusual for states to change their methods for filling vacancies, Owens Hubler said. When they have tried to do so, it’s generally been to move from appointments to special elections, not the other way around.
In Pennsylvania, there hasn’t been a widespread push for change. Bills have been introduced in recent legislative sessions to bar candidates from running for more than one office at a time, which could reduce the number of people forcing special elections because they were simultaneously elected to two seats and had to decline one. For example, a special election was necessary in February 2023 after Summer Lee won a seat in both the state House and the U.S. Congress in the 2022 general election.
“The needless vacancies created by candidates pursuing multiple offices have had a detrimental impact on the governance of our Commonwealth, with legislative bodies almost evenly split along partisan lines, and taxpayers have been burdened with the costs associated with running special elections, which can total hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single state house district,” former state Sen. John DiSanto said in a memo introducing one of those bills in 2023.
State Sen. Lisa Baker reintroduced DiSanto’s proposal this session as Senate Bill 658, but the bill has yet to receive a vote in the Senate State Government Committee.
Bluestein said there are several considerations when it comes to special elections that need to be balanced: the need for representation, saving taxpayers money, and the stress on election workers.
“But right now,” he said, “I think that balance is tilted in the wrong direction.”
Nathaniel Rakich contributed reporting.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
