(File Photo: Source for Photo: FILE – Mail-in and absentee ballots are seen at the elections warehouse in Pittsburgh, April 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Harrisburg, PA) Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt certified the results of Pennsylvania’s 2026 primary election yesterday in Harrisburg after county officials confirmed the accuracy of reported results through two pre-certification audits.
Once Schmidt received certified results from all 67 counties, the Department of State reviewed the totals before the Secretary signed the official certification document as required by state law.
The results were validated by two different audits and they take different approaches to reach the same goal: confirming that all results have been reported accurately.
One of them 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 that audit after every election.
The other is a statistically based risk-limiting audit, which is known as an RLA. RLAs involve randomly chosen counties hand-tallying votes for one statewide race in a randomly selected batches of ballots.
This demonstrates the Shapiro Administration’s continued commitment to transparency in election administration and the Department livestreamed the process to produce a random 20-digit number used to identify which counties were selected to audit which batches of ballots. The Republican race for lieutenant governor was the only contested statewide race on the ballot, so that one was the race audited in this RLA.
In total, election officials in 15 counties manually reviewed 4,435 ballots and then determined that the reported outcome of the Republican race for lieutenant governor was accurate.
According to a release from the Pennsylvania Department of State, these counties were randomly selected to complete the RLA:
- Allegheny
- Berks
- Bradford
- Bucks
- Chester
- Columbia
- Delaware
- Lancaster
- Lebanon
- Lehigh
- Luzerne
- Montgomery
- Pike
- Washington
- Westmoreland