Pennsylvania holds partisan elections for state and local office every year. This year the Pennsylvania partisan primaries are on May 21. This article describes the problems in Mercer County for election officials. They would like to start printing primary ballots (overseas absentee ballots must be sent no later than April 6) but the cumbersome Pennsylvania challenge system makes that difficult this year.

In the November 2012 election, Pennsylvania was the last state to know which candidates would be on its statewide ballot. Elections officials had to print ballots for overseas voters before they knew whether the Libertarian statewide slate would be on the ballot. Those ballots were printed with the Libertarians on, but if the petition challenge against the Libertarian petition had succeeded, votes cast for Libertarians would have been invalid.