PENNSYLVANIA, USA — The race for attorney general pits Republican York County District Attorney Dave Sunday against former auditor general and state Rep. Eugene DePasquale, the Democratic Party nominee.
Sunday, a Navy veteran, has emphasized his 15 years as a prosecutor in York County, a Republican majority area with about 460,000 residents south of Harrisburg, near Maryland.
DePasquale is a lawyer, former York City economic development director and three-term state representative. As auditor general, he drew attention to a large backlog of untested rape kits, unanswered calls to Pennsylvania's ChildLine child abuse hotline and nursing home conditions.
DePasquale's time running the auditor general's office “has nothing to do with criminal law,” Sunday said during a debate earlier this month.
DePasquale, who lives in Pittsburgh, said he would prioritize protecting voting and emphasized his support for abortion rights.
Sunday said he would “enforce and defend the abortion laws in Pennsylvania,” arguing there is “no scenario that exists where I would ever prosecute a woman for having an abortion.” Many of Sunday’s Republican supporters favor an abortion ban, DePasquale said, and GOP state lawmakers tried to push through a constitutional amendment saying it does not guarantee any rights relating to abortion or public funding of abortions.
DePasquale said he has “serious concerns” about capital punishment, while Sunday said that in the “most sad, tragic, terrible cases” he supports the death penalty.
Also up for election to the seat are the following candidates:
Justin Magill (C) - Pa. Attorney General
Eric Settle (F) - Pa. Attorney General
Richard Weiss (G) - Pa. Attorney General
Rob Cowburn (L) - Pa. Attorney General
Scroll over the map below to see vote totals for each candidate for each county in Pennsylvania.
When will all the votes be counted in Pennsylvania?
Several factors contribute to a relatively slow vote counting process in Pennsylvania.
Under Pennsylvania law, elections officials must wait until 7 a.m. ET on Election Day before they can begin to process ballots cast by mail and prepare them to be counted. The release of mail voting results cannot begin until after polls have closed. Because of the overall volume of mail ballots — they comprised almost a quarter of the total vote in the 2022 midterm elections — and the varying amounts of time it takes the state’s 67 counties to tally these votes, determining a winner in a highly competitive race could take several days, as it did in the 2020 presidential election.
The first vote results reported after polls close are expected to come from mail ballots. Results from later in the night are expected to be a mix of mail votes and votes cast in person on Election Day. Once the vote counting stretches into the day after Election Day and beyond, the vote results are once again expected to come mostly from mail ballots.
Overall, votes cast by mail have tended to favor Democrats, ever since the issue of early and mail voting became highly politicized during the 2020 election. This means the Democratic candidate in a competitive contest could take an early lead in the vote count in the initial vote reports after polls close, even though the race may tighten considerably as more votes are tabulated.
In 2020, Biden took an early, temporary lead after mail voting results began to be released shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. ET. By about 10 p.m. ET, Trump took the lead as more results from Election Day voting were released. By early Wednesday morning, Trump led Biden by nearly 700,000 votes, but that lead would gradually shrink as more mail ballots were tabulated. Biden eventually retook the lead by Friday morning.
The suburban “collar counties” around Philadelphia are key battlegrounds and have been trending toward Democrats in recent years. In statewide elections, Republican candidates tend to win overwhelmingly in rural areas statewide, while Democrats rely on lopsided support in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Erie and Northampton counties on opposite sides of the state may also hold clues on election night. They are two of only 10 counties across all the presidential battlegrounds that voted for Trump in 2016 and flipped to Biden in 2020.
The Associated Press doesn’t make projections and will declare a winner only when it has determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap. If a race hasn’t been called, the AP will continue to cover any newsworthy developments, like candidate concessions or declarations of victory. In doing so, the AP will make clear it hasn’t declared a winner and explain why.
In Pennsylvania, races with a vote margin of 0.5 percentage points or less are subject to an automatic recount. The AP may declare a winner in a race that is eligible for a recount if it can determine the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.
