On May 14, 2025, Carmen Russell-Sluchansky published an article titled “Pa. GOP seeks to gain control of state’s highest court, where final decisions are made on voting and abortion” in WHYY.
State judicial elections typically garner little attention, but Pennsylvania’s 2025 state Supreme Court races are shaping up to be the next major political battleground. Three justices — Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht — are seeking to retain their seats on the state’s highest court, but Republican activists are looking to nix them from the court.
The state Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that counties are allowed to accept mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day and which are received up to three days later, shooting down Republican-led challenges to have the ballots not count toward that year’s election. The decision was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 in a 4-4 split decision, without newly appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
We “could have a 5-to-2 Republican majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court going into the 2028 presidential election,” Presler told the Delaware Valley Journal.
That has Kadida Kenner, a voting rights activist and CEO of the New Pennsylvania Project, concerned about the impact on how the court makes those decisions. She says that a “MAGA majority” on the court would lead to voter suppression, as well as restrictions on reproductive rights.
“There are some folks in these political times that are trying to make decisions coming out of our courts more political,” she told WHYY News, adding that the stakes have never been higher.
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