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Lawmaker proposes removing candidates' home counties from Pa. primary ballots • Pennsylvania Capital-Star [1]
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Date: 2025-07-21 23:28:16+00:00
Rep. Jill Cooper (R-Westmoreland) wants to encourage Pennsylvanians to vote for candidates based on their qualifications and policies, as opposed to regional ties, which can strongly influence statewide elections.
Cooper says she plans to introduce legislation to eliminate the requirement to list candidates’ home counties on primary ballots. She argues the change would eliminate divisive attitudes toward candidates based on geographical stereotypes.
Public opinion experts largely agree that details like county affiliations often have arbitrary influence over voters, whose next major decision may be in next year’s Republican gubernatorial primary.
But in practice, experts are wary that getting voters to look deeper into primary candidates may prove more difficult than removing county affiliation from ballots.
Pennsylvania’s Election Code currently requires primary ballots to include candidates’ home county or municipality. A candidate’s county is must be printed opposite or under the candidate’s name when it appears on ballots in multiple counties. When a candidate is running in only one county, or a district within that county, the candidate’s home city, borough, township or ward, must also be printed opposite or under their name on the ballot.
The requirement does not apply to general election ballots.
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Ultimately, “the qualifications of a candidate are more important than the geographical location of where they live,” Cooper said. Voters might have a bias against the suburbs and favor an urban area, or in a state race, they might favor a candidate from a certain region of the state, while disapproving of another region, she explained.
She is currently recruiting co-sponsors and believes the legislation will attract bipartisan support.
While county affiliations can influence voters at the polls, it is only one of many factors they consider, said Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll.
It’s “just another bit of information that voters can use to make up their mind,” he said.
When voters have limited information about candidates, they use “cognitive shortcuts” to choose their votes, Muhlenberg College political science professor Chris Borick said. That also holds true for general elections, he said, where the party affiliation for each candidate plays the overwhelming role in voter decisionmaking.
Party affiliation isn’t a factor in a primary election, when all candidates come from the same party. So voters turn to other shortcuts, such as a county of residence, to make their final decisions, Yost explained.
But regional affinity is not the only cue voters take from the primary ballot. Voters use arbitrary measures like ballot position or a candidate’s perceived gender to make their decision in the absence of more information, according to Yost and Borick.
“There isn’t one thing that necessarily matters. It’s the cluster of characteristics that each candidate represents,” Yost said.
Cooper agrees that a candidate’s perceived gender or ethnicity, based on names, may also influence voters, but those assumptions are impossible to eliminate and also appear on a general ballot. According to her, having county residence on the ballot does not serve a productive purpose, and the candidate’s residence can be easily removed.
County affiliation plays a magnified role in low-turnout, uncontested elections, according to Yost. Recently, Pennsylvania’s spring 2025 primaries had “undoubtedly disappointing turnout,” he told the Capital Star in May.
His research on recent primaries shows in a majority of elections, candidates received a larger share of the vote in their home counties than than their statewide share.
Republicans maintaining their current narrow majority beyond 2026 may hinge upon a few key races in Pennsylvania.
Additionally, Borick said county affiliation is most likely to affect down-ballot races, such as state races for attorney general, auditor general, treasurer, and judges, where voters often have little knowledge about the candidates.
He called Cooper’s concerns a “fair critique” of the current primary ballot system, since only listing the name and county residence might undermine the purpose of voting on a candidate’s merit.
But Borick added a caveat: “Without that information, what voters use to make decisions might still be very limited.” In other words, it is unclear whether voters would change their habits and do more detailed research on candidates if the state stripped primary ballots of county affiliations, Borick said.
Some civic-minded groups do not take issue with the existence of counties on primary ballots, but want to champion efforts to better inform voters.
“While we don’t see this as an issue from an election administration standpoint, we should prioritize addressing the larger challenge of ensuring voters have access to more meaningful information on candidates,” The Committee of Seventy Communications Director Genevieve Greene said in a statement to the Capital-Star.
Regardless of potential solutions, lawmakers and public opinion experts stressed that a candidate’s local roots have historically played a powerful role in Pennsylvania politics.
Cooper has seen this effect since she was elected to the Westmoreland Republican Committee in 2008, she said. “This bill was not triggered by a specific race in the past or a specific race in the future. To me, it was just something that I had been thinking about for a long time,” she said.
Borick sees a parallel between Cooper’s proposal and reform measures in the Progressive Era to promote nonpartisan elections and remove party affiliation from the ballot. At the end of the 19th century, reformers, who condemned partisanship as divisive, wanted to encourage voters to better inform themselves on candidates before voting.
In Pennsylvania, a deep-rooted divide between the western and eastern parts of the commonwealth has historically had an outsized role in electoral politics, Borick said.
The undue influence of geography has most significantly influenced judicial races in the past, said Deborah Gross, president of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, which advocates for public access to the judiciary. A historic bias against Philadelphia has often been evident in voters’ decisions at the ballot box.
Although she does not know its origin, Gross said historically “a lot of the Supreme Court justices came from the western part of the state rather than the eastern part of the state.”
Currently, two justices come from Philadelphia, while three come from Allegheny County, and two come from central Pennsylvania.
Most recently, the home county influence played an important role in last spring’s Democratic primary for state treasurer, when Allegheny County resident Erin McClelland won 53% to 46% against the Democratic Party’s endorsed candidate for treasurer, state Rep. Ryan Bizzarro of Erie County, according to Yost.
Despite the endorsement, voters’ preference for local candidates helped propel McClelland’s victory, along with historically higher voter turnout in the western part of the state, he said. McClelland lost the general election to Republican incumbent Treasurer Stacy Garrity.
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