HARRISBURG — 2025 is a municipal election year in Pennsylvania.
These elections regularly see low voter turnout and less media coverage, sending the message that they aren’t as important as a midterm or presidential election.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
In May, Democrats and Republicans will cast their ballots for their parties’ candidates in primary elections. Ballots will vary depending on where voters live, and could include races for mayor, school board, city council, various judicial offices, district attorney, and more. These elected officials have regular, close contact with communities and can use that power for good (and bad).
Statewide, these voters will weigh in on primary candidates for Commonwealth and Superior Courts.
Come November, all voters will be asked to consider statewide judicial retention questions. These yes-or-no nonpartisan elections ask voters to decide whether a judge should have another 10-year term.
This year, judges from all three of Pennsylvania’s statewide appellate courts are up for retention, but the big focus is on the state Supreme Court. With three justices facing retention, control of the high court is up in the air, and the stakes are high.
Spotlight PA’s nonpartisan election coverage will focus on connecting the stakes of select races to the lives of Pennsylvanians, monitoring and explaining the systems that underpin Pennsylvania elections and their administration, and combating lies and safeguarding our democracy.
We will provide essential election information to Pennsylvanians on the candidates in select local and key statewide races, share how to participate in the electoral process, and explain how election systems are supposed to work. All of this coverage can be found on the Spotlight PA Election Center website.
We will create interactive tools and resources to help voters choose the candidates who best reflect their needs and values. We have also relaunched our Election Assistant to help answer questions voters have about the voting process in Pennsylvania, and continue to publish our election content in Spanish. We aim to reach, educate, and empower voters in new ways.
This voter-centric approach builds upon the years of election reporting at the core of our public-service mission. Regardless of political affiliation, trusted and nonpartisan election reporting is the bedrock of an informed electorate and an informed vote.
As always, all of Spotlight PA’s public-service election coverage will be free and available to all on spotlightpa.org and through the more than 120 community newsroom partners across the state that republish our work.
For the first time, Spotlight PA will cover select local races.
It is impossible for us to cover the thousands of races taking place across Pennsylvania’s 67 counties this year. Instead, we’re leaning into the regions where we already have an understanding of the political landscape, the communities that live there, and a strong reporting presence: State College and Berks County.
Both of Spotlight PA’s regional bureaus will go in-depth on one local race and provide the residents who live there with candidate guides and resources.
Spotlight PA’s new Berks Bureau will cover the race for Reading City Council president because of its impact on residents. The council president is crucial to setting the legislative agenda and tone of debate in Pennsylvania’s fourth-largest city as it seeks economic renaissance. Reading emerged just three years ago from state oversight as a financially distressed city. It struggles with blight, aging infrastructure, and a lack of affordable housing.
Current Council President Donna Reed faces challenges from two first-term Latino council members, Jaime Baez Jr. and Vanessa Campos. All three are Democrats. Most registered voters are Democrats in Reading, and nearly two-thirds of its residents are Hispanic.
The bureau has published a guide that includes biographical information about each primary candidate to help inform voters about how they are similar and different.
Spotlight PA’s State College regional bureau is covering the State College Area School District Board of Directors race. Four seats are up for grabs on the school board, and seven candidates are cross-filed in the primary, meaning that the same people will appear on both the Democratic and Republican tickets.
About 95,000 people live within the boundary of the State College Area School District, according to 2020 U.S. Census data, making it the most populated district in the bureau’s 14-county coverage area.
The school board makes policies that affect the district’s roughly 6,700 students and hundreds of employees, as well as their family members.
In addition to that, the school board has the power to levy property taxes. The board approved tax increases in each of the past three years. The budget proposal currently being weighed by the board proposes raising taxes by 4%.
Spotlight PA State College asked each school board hopeful to fill out a questionnaire to help inform a candidate guide for the race.
The bureau also plans to publish an interactive tool to help voters learn which candidates most closely align with the issues that are important to them.
This year is an important year for the commonwealth’s legal system. The Commonwealth, Superior, and Supreme Courts hold immense power. Judges often serve for decades, and the decisions they make touch a range of critical issues that can directly affect the everyday lives of Pennsylvanians.
Statewide, Pennsylvanians will vote to fill one vacancy on Commonwealth Court and one on Superior Court. Democrats and Republicans will consider which candidates to send to the general election on May 20 — you can find a guide to those races here.
In November, Pennsylvanians will also be asked whether or not to retain judges on those courts as well as state Supreme Court. These races will be Spotlight PA’s main coverage focus.
These elections tend to be uneventful and usually result in the retention of a judge. However, Republicans and their allies have an opportunity to make a dent in the Democratic majority on the state Supreme Court. We expect both political parties will spend big on these races because of the stakes.
Our team expects to dig into the justices’ records, examine who is spending money on these races and why, and demystify how the high court works and explain its importance in the lives of everyday Pennsylvanians.
As we’ve done in previous years, Spotlight PA will provide in-depth information about candidates, their policy positions, and what those policies would mean for Pennsylvania. These reports will be informed by our newsroom talking with elected officials, candidates, campaign staffers, and you.
What we will not do: regularly publish “horse race” coverage — stories that focus on campaign stops, the latest attacks, or who is winning or losing in the polls. Other news outlets will provide that coverage, and we don’t see a need to duplicate it. If you’d like to follow the granular developments on the campaign trail, sign up for Spotlight PA’s daily newsletter, PA Post.
Horse race coverage has also been shown to exacerbate the extreme partisanship we see today. Research compiled by the Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative, shows that these stories can lead to distrust in news outlets and politicians, as well as create an “uninformed electorate.”
Additionally, Spotlight PA does not publish any editorial or opinion content, nor does it take a position on any particular political party or policy. The newsroom also does not endorse candidates.
Our effort to empower voters has three planks: to provide reliable information about where candidates stand on the issues; to explain how elections in Pennsylvania are run; and to educate voters on how to protect themselves against misinformation.
We call this a voter-centric approach.
We will produce voter guides for the primary election that provide critical information about deadlines, where to vote, how to vote, and how to get involved in the process. All of this coverage will be available as part of the Spotlight PA Election Center website, and some of it will also be available in Spanish.
Building from our 2024 coverage on Pennsylvania's electoral system, we will continue to report on election lawsuits in real time and use our statewide contacts on the ground to bring the latest updates to voters.
After the 2020 presidential election and in the years since, Pennsylvania’s voting process — in particular, its mail voting law — has come under intense scrutiny and attack by Republicans, some of whom have advanced false or misleading claims put forth by former President Donald Trump. Our coverage will help readers parse the noise from the facts.
This approach, called “prebunking,” is an alternative to traditional fact-checking by news organizations. Instead of chasing down every false claim, we educate and empower voters to better recognize these efforts and guard against them. In doing so, we monitor for areas of voter confusion and explain how processes and government work. Confusion is often the precursor to mis- and disinformation taking hold.
We aim to support readers in their search for facts.
If you are concerned about confusing or false information being disseminated about this election or the voting process, please contact us using the form below. Your observations on the ground may help shape our reporting on the election.
News organizations have traditionally collected voting results in hopes of reporting on a winner or projected winner in a race on the night of the election. For many reasons, this approach is no longer viable in Pennsylvania during some high-turnout elections and can contribute to confusion and mistrust.
By state law, Pennsylvania counties cannot process mail ballots before Election Day, and many have different procedures for counting votes and in what order.
For those reasons and more, we will not publish results stories until the vast majority or all of the ballots are tabulated and then report on the projected winner. What matters to us is being right, not first.
For voters interested in seeing rolling tallies, Spotlight PA will publish and make available for free a tool that displays Associated Press results. Learn more about how the AP calls races here.
In 2025, Spotlight PA will continue past efforts and launch a set of new projects designed to engage voters and connect them with crucial election information.
Spotlight PA will continue to offer some of our election content, voter resources, and guides in Spanish, to reach the growing Latino voting bloc that resides in the state. Part of this endeavor includes growing our Spanish-language partners across the state to distribute this content to, as well as partnering with community organizations to host in-person and virtual events.
To help voters navigate the election process, Spotlight PA will publish new interactive candidate quizzes focused on primary races in different regions of the commonwealth. We have also relaunched our Election Assistant tool, which answers questions about voting processes in Pennsylvania.
Our first candidate quiz of the year aims to help Democrats and Republicans in Pittsburgh navigate candidates in the race for mayor. The quiz will help voters determine the mayoral candidate that best aligns with their values and ideals. Our State College bureau will publish a quiz on the candidates for State College Area School District Board of Directors with the same aim.
We plan to publish both quizzes in early May.
We are also excited to bring back our Election Assistant after launching it ahead of the 2024 general election. It started as an experiment using AI to answer thousands of unique reader questions that would otherwise be impossible for our team to address individually. We’ve spent a year working to refine the tool and narrow the content, with a focus on ensuring accuracy.
Last year, the tool answered questions about statewide races and candidates, as well as policy positions. This year, the tool will focus specifically on voting processes.
It will tell you about when and where to vote; the different methods to cast a ballot; the basics of election administration; and relevant legal rulings and how they affect the election system.
So how does AI play a role? It searches published reporting by Spotlight PA and trusted resources from the Pennsylvania Department of State, then generates suggested questions and answers that are reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by our journalists.
When the tool is live, AI matches reader queries with pre-programmed answers and suggests follow-up questions. Readers will only see answers that have been reviewed by a human to ensure accuracy.
It’s also bilingual and allows readers to ask questions and receive responses in Spanish, with links to previously translated Spotlight PA articles.
In 2024, Spotlight PA created three fun, informative videos on row office candidates for Instagram. We plan to expand on this initiative in 2025 with social videos focused on both candidates and how voting works.
Spotlight PA’s coverage aims to put voters first.
Elizabeth Estrada, Pennsylvania's first and only democracy editor, leads our Democracy Initiative. Estrada’s mission is to identify the information voters need to make an informed decision and make sure it reaches them.
She will ensure Spotlight PA’s Election Center is a one-stop resource for all voter and candidate guides, watchdog coverage, and public-service tools and explainers.
If you have ideas for the Democracy Initiative and how Spotlight PA can better serve you this election, contact Estrada at eestrada@spotlightpa.org.
Spotlight PA also wants to hear your questions about the races. We won’t be able to answer all of them, but our team of reporters will get to as many as possible. Send a message using the form below (if you can’t see the form, click here):
All of Spotlight PA’s election coverage will be available on our site and through more than 120 newsroom partners across the state. All election-related content, from stories to voter guides and interactive tools, will also be available in our Election Center.
If you subscribe to one of our newsletters, you’ll also get periodic Voter Alerts letting you know about our latest coverage, key developments, and important upcoming dates. Sign up at spotlightpa.org/newsletters.
BEFORE YOU GO… If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to Spotlight PA at spotlightpa.org/donate. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.