(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) According to a release in Harrisburg today from the Pennsylvania Department of State, 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. It was roughly 42.45% of registered voters in Pennsylvania who cast a ballot in the November election, which happens to be well above the turnout of 36.77% for the 2023 municipal election. It was emphasized by Schmidt that before counties certified their results, they again conducted two audits of their vote tallies successfully. Different approaches were taken by the two audits to reach the same goal of confirming whether all results have been correctly reported. One of these audits 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, for whichever is fewer and after every election, all counties must perform this audit. The other of these audits, known as an RLA and is a statistically based risk-limiting audit, which involves randomly chosen counties hand-tallying votes for one randomly chosen statewide race in randomly selected batches of ballots. In addition, In total, auditors that were in nine counties reviewed 4,343 ballots manually and determined that the reported outcome of the randomly selected retention contest for Superior Court Judge Alice Beck Dubow was correct. You can go to vote.pa.gov/audits by clicking here to learn more about how Pennsylvania verifies the results of every election. The official vote returns for all of the statewide races in November are on the website of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by clicking here.