Pennsylvania wrote the founding documents. It has spent 250 years arguing over what they mean.

In courtrooms and committee rooms, Harrisburg and Philadelphia are fighting over the same questions the founders left unresolved: Who votes? Who draws the maps? And who gets to decide? As the nation gathers in this state to mark its 250th birthday, the battles over Pennsylvania’s election laws offer an unsettling mirror of how democracy actually works — and how easily it can be bent.

The state escaped the redistricting battles that played out over the last year, largely because power is divided: Democrats hold a narrow majority in the state House, and Gov. Josh Shapiro is a Democrat; Republicans control the Senate. That balance of power is up for grabs in November.

Shapiro is up for election this year, facing Republican state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, who was unopposed in the primary. Control of both chambers of the state Legislature will also be decided in November.

If Republicans win the governor’s mansion — pairing with their existing Senate majority — or if Democrats take the Senate outright, the state could face a redistricting fight before the decade is out.

“There are entities on both sides who have identified Pennsylvania as one of the top targets for redistricting after the midterms,” said Carol Kuniholm, chair of Fair Districts PA, a group that has been lobbying for years to get lawmakers in Harrisburg to approve a non-partisan redistricting commission. “Republican groups see Pennsylvania as the biggest win because they think they could get six districts that would otherwise go to Democrats. And then the Democrats see the reverse. They see being able to pick up more Republican districts by mapping.”

Now, this is not by winning elections. This is by drawing maps that would flip it in their direction.”

“That’s a pretty toxic reality,” she said.

Single-party control will make redistricting an inviting opportunity for political leaders, but a 2018 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision could present a significant roadblock, said Kuniholm and election watchdog groups.

In that decision, the Democratic-majority state Supreme Court struck down the state’s congressional maps as an unconstitutionally partisan gerrymander, ruling that they violated Article 1, Section 5 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, the Free and Equal Elections Clause, which states, “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”

Before that ruling, Republicans held 13 of the state’s 18 seats in Congress. At the time, 46% of registered voters in Pennsylvania were Democrats, while Republicans accounted for 38% of registered voters, state voter registration data shows.

In the first election after the ruling, the state’s delegation was split evenly with nine representatives from each major political party. Republicans hold 10 of the state’s 17 seats in Congress after flipping two Democratic-held seats in 2024 — Rep. Ryan Mackenzie defeated Rep. Susan Wild in the Lehigh Valley, and Rep. Rob Bresnahan defeated incumbent Rep. Matt Cartwright in northeastern Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania lost a seat following the 2020 census, reducing the delegation from 18 to 17.

Currently, 43% of Pennsylvania’s registered voters are Democrats, 41% are Republicans and 16% are independents or belong to minor political parties, according to state voter registration data.

David Thornburgh, a former president and CEO of the Committee of Seventy, Philadelphia’s nonpartisan government watchdog, and a leading voice in Pennsylvania election reform, said that the 2018 decision established a precedent that the state’s top court can reject gerrymandered maps.

“That’s huge,” he said.

Thornburgh said that while gerrymandering has existed for centuries, technology has transformed it into something the founders could not have imagined.

“I think it’s the magnitude of the weapons that they have at their disposal, that makes previous attempts sort of look mild and almost amateurish. You have big data and sophisticated mapping technology.

So this has turned into a nuclear war. It’s not just sticks and stones,” he said. “Now it’s all sort of turbo-charged. And then, it’s been said over and over the norms that we had: ‘It’s OK to rig the maps, but just don’t get greedy, because if you get greedy about it, then the voters will kill you.’ Seemingly, those guardrails are just not there right now.”

The lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s gerrymandered congressional maps was filed in 2017 by the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania and a group of voters who argued the maps were drawn to entrench Republican power.

While the League’s lawsuit prompted the state Supreme Court to create new maps between census cycles — a break with standard practice tied to decennial population counts — midcycle redistricting is far from ideal, said Amy Widestrom, executive director of the League of Women

Voters of Pennsylvania.

“The position of the legal women voters is that midcycle redistricting is bad practice. Redistricting is tied to the census so we have a better understanding of population patterns. People move. This is why states gain and lose a member of Congress,” Widestrom said. “We’ve done a census every 10 years since 1790. And we tie our redistricting to that.

It is bad practice to do it midcycle because we do not have an accurate accounting of population patterns.”

In August 2025, as the redistricting fight was intensifying, the national League of Women Voters issued a statement condemning the “tit-for-tat approach to redistricting” and saying it will erode “public trust in our democracy.”

But drawing the maps is only one front in Pennsylvania’s election wars.

Closed primaries

The fight over drawing legislative and congressional district lines is by no means the only front in Pennsylvania’s election battles.

Pennsylvania is one of nine states with closed primaries, in which only registered members of a major political party can vote in that party’s primary. That leaves roughly 1.4 million independent voters shut out from most primary contests — able to weigh in on only ballot questions.

Over the past decade, good government groups have lobbied the state to embrace open primaries, getting the backing of a variety of influential political figures for their cause but ultimately getting little traction at the Capitol. Then-Sen. Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson, at the time the most powerful lawmaker in the chamber as Senate president pro tempore, announced in 2018 that he would introduce legislation to open the state’s primaries to combat the political polarization hardening in the Legislature. Despite his backing, the measure — Senate Bill 1234 — never got out of committee. By the end of 2020, Scarnati announced he would not seek reelection.

Frustrated by the lack of progress, a group of independent voters filed a King’s Bench petition in July 2025 asking the state Supreme Court to open the primaries. The Supreme Court rebuffed the petition in August 2025 and directed the group to refile the lawsuit in a lower statewide appeals court first. That lawsuit is still pending.

The House State Government Committee in May 2025 approved House Bill 280 on a 14-12 party-line vote, with all Democrats supporting and all Republicans opposed. Authored by Reps. Jared Solomon and Chris Rabb, both Philadelphia Democrats,

HB 280 would allow independent voters to pick which party’s primary they want to participate in. The bill was tabled before it could reach the full House.

Republicans said the state has no need to open its primaries since any unaffiliated voter who wants to participate can do so by switching their registration before the state’s voter deadline. Letting them choose a party on primary day itself would give independents a right that registered party members don’t have, Rep. Russ Diamond, R-Lebanon, said ahead of the committee vote. The open primary bill has been stalled in the Senate State Government Committee. Sen. Cris Dush, R-Jefferson, the chairman of the committee, has publicly criticized open primary legislation, saying it would be like letting fans of one sports team help determine the lineup of another.

But supporters argue that closed primaries amount to taxation without representation for nonpartisan voters who see their tax dollars used to pay for primaries they can’t vote in. Independent voter groups have estimated that it costs the state and counties $75 million to conduct each primary.

Closed primaries have subtler effects on the political landscape. Primaries generally draw smaller electorates because there are fewer contested races.

“You’ve got a small percentage of Pennsylvanians, who are very partisan, choosing the legislators that are running for office,” Widestrom said.

Pennsylvania election law also gives preferential treatment to the major political parties in other ways. Republican and Democratic party officials can obtain lists of voters who have not yet voted on Election Day in order to contact them — a turnout tool the state does not provide to nonpartisan groups.

“Nobody’s ballot chasing for unaffiliated voters,” Widestrom said.

The fight over who gets to vote in primaries is part of a broader tug-of-war over ballot access that extends to how votes are cast and returned.

Drop box debate

Pennsylvania has allowed voters to use drop boxes and satellite offices to return mail-in ballots since a state Supreme Court ruling in September 2020 that interpreted the state’s 2019 mail voting law, Act 77, to permit counties to set up the locations.

Legislation approved by the Senate State Government Committee on June 2 would end the practice amid Republican concerns about ballot security.

Senate Bill 599 would bar counties from accepting ballots at satellite offices and end the use of unsupervised drop boxes, requiring voters to return ballots only to each county’s main election office. The bill passed the committee on a 7-4 party-line vote, with all Republicans supporting and all Democrats opposed. It now awaits a vote by the full Senate. Even if it passes, it would face an uncertain future in the Democratic-controlled state House.

Dush said the legislation is needed to crack down on the use of unmonitored drop boxes.

“The whole genesis of this problem is the fact that the Legislature has not made the determination as to whether or not we want drop boxes in the first place,” he said.

Dush cited findings from the Lehigh County district attorney, who determined that hundreds more ballots were deposited in a drop box during the 2021 general election than video surveillance showed voters depositing. Lehigh County DA Jim Martin, now retired, said his office didn’t charge any voters for depositing extra ballots because officials could not identify each individual with certainty.

The discrepancy was large enough to have influenced the results of two dozen races in the county.

“It’s very dissatisfying to the person who lost the election when they don’t know for certain they actually did lose,” Dush said.

Ahead of the State Government Committee vote, Sen. Steve Santarsiero, D-Bucks, the minority chairman of the committee, said no one was charged and no votes were thrown out over the allegations of ballot-stuffing.

“We, as a democracy, continue to lag behind other democratic nations in our percentage of people who vote. We should be doing everything we can to increase that so that our elections truly reflect the will of the people,” he said. “I see no reason we should restrict that. There is no proof of fraudulent voting happening.”

Separation of powers

It is not only election mechanics that concern those who watch democracy up close. For some conservatives in Pennsylvania — voices who helped build the modern Republican Party in the state — the greatest threat is coming from the top.

Dush said the October 2020 court ruling on drop boxes is an example of how the courts and the executive branch have overstepped their roles.

The Pennsylvania Constitution clearly grants the authority to write laws to the Legislature.

“When the Supreme Court, out of whole cloth, created drop boxes and the executive branch went along with it, we had the players and coaches and the referees colluding to change the rules on the field of play,” Dush said. “When I talk to students or anybody else when I’m describing this form of government, I say, ‘Go back to the schoolyard during recess when somebody decided that they were going to change the rules of the game. What happened?’ You had fights.”

Marc Scaringi, Harrisburg attorney and conservative radio host, was one of the last two attorneys remaining on President Donald Trump’s legal team challenging Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results — signing the final court filing alongside Rudy Giuliani asking a federal judge to hand the state’s electoral votes to Trump. But today he is sharply critical of the president and his administration’s approach to the rule of law.

Scaringi argued that Trump’s military strikes against Iran without congressional authorization — bypassing what the Constitution explicitly grants to Congress — amounted to an unchecked concentration of executive power.

“I do not believe the president respects the core principles of democracy,” Scaringi said.

Scaringi also said that the America First philosophy should not be tied to any single political figure or movement. It should serve as a broader principle for shaping public policy.

“I’ve always been America First, and I think we all should be. It shouldn’t just be tied to one politician or political movement.”

Scaringi declined to comment on whether election fraud remains a significant threat to American democracy.

Thornburgh — whose father, Dick Thornburgh, a Republican, served as Pennsylvania governor from 1979 to 1987 and U.S. Attorney General from 1988 to 1991 — said Trump’s contempt for legal norms has only been enabled by Republicans who hold the majority in both houses of Congress.

Two and a half centuries after the founders drafted rules of self-governance a few blocks from Independence Hall, the arguments over who gets to play by those rules show no sign of settling.

“My father used to talk about folks in this business who were serious. And he had a lot of respect for people who were serious — which meant that they understood the traditions and the people who came before them and honored that.

I don’t think our current president does. … This guy, I don’t think you could pass a basic civics test if you gave it to him,” Thornburgh said. “We’re living through an incredible pressure testing of the infrastructure of democracy.”