Democrats won Friday morning in their fight to maintain a one-seat majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, with incumbent Cambria County Republican Frank Burns nearly 3 points ahead of his Republican challenger.
Cambria County election officials released the results overnight after working since Tuesday to fix a voting system failure caused by misprinted ballots that could not be scanned electronically.
With more than 96% of the votes counted, Burns had 16,623 votes, a 936-vote advantage over Republican Amy Bradley, a former television journalist and president of the Cambria Area Chamber of Commerce.
The 72nd Legislative District, where Burns has served since 2009, is located entirely in Cambria County, whose president-elect Donald Trump with a lead of over 30 points according to unofficial data this year. The district includes the town of Johnstown.
“I am incredibly honored to have received the only votes that matter, the votes of the people of Cambria County,” Burns said in a statement Friday. “Thank you for your support and trust. I remain committed to improving our local economy, making our communities safer and restoring more state resources to invest in Cambria County.”
Bradley and the House Republican Campaign Committee did not respond to phone messages and text messages seeking comment.
Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in 2022 for the first time in 12 years. Since then, the party has retained its majority in eight special elections. Democratic leaders say the majority has allowed them to work with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro to pass legislation providing tax breaks for working families and seniors, in addition to school funding reform.
“This is a historic victory for the DLCC and our allies in Pennsylvania. Protecting the Democrat majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives was one of the toughest yet most important priorities of the cycle, and Pennsylvania Democrats and the DLCC worked closely to secure this decisive victory. “Republicans made flipping the chamber a top priority, but they failed to win a single seat,” said Heather Williams, chairwoman of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, an arm of the national Democratic Party that supports state legislative campaigns.
Williams said a Democratic majority in the House would provide a check on “Republican extremism” and said the committee would continue to make Pennsylvania a priority as it worked on the trio controlling both chambers of the state Legislature and the governor’s office.
In the state Senate, each party flipped one seat, but Republicans retained a 28-22 majority.
Cambria County President Commissioner Scott Hunt said at a news conference Tuesday that election officials encountered problems scanning ballots immediately after polls opened at 1 p.m. 7:00.
The Board of Elections filed an emergency relief request in the Cambria County Courthouse, asking for permission to keep polling places open overdue due to the outage. Late Tuesday morning, Presiding Judge Linda Rovder Fleming issued an order granting the commission’s request to extend voting hours until Tuesday at 10 p.m. The order stated that any votes cast after 8 p.m. were to be cast by provisional ballot.
Meanwhile, county officials tried to deal with the voting problem. In consultation with the Department of State and county legal counsel, election workers have been instructed to keep unscanned ballots in lockers where they would otherwise be stored after being scanned, general counsel Ronald Repak told the Capital-Star on Wednesday.
But when the boxes filled up, the Board of Elections again consulted the State Department and a lawyer to authorize sheriff’s deputies to collect the ballots and deliver them to the elections office.
As polls closed at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, the election board worked to ensure all ballots were accurately counted, Repak said. The ballots that could not be scanned, which includes all ballots cast before about 3 p.m. Tuesday, were manually copied by election officials under the supervision of representatives from each party, Repak said, adding that he was unsure how many ballots were to be voting fell into this category. .
