Rep. Brad Roae, R-Meadville, speaks during a news conference earlier this year in Harrisburg.

State Rep. Brad Roae wants to make it easier for Pennsylvania residents to follow election results.

Rose, R-Meadville, has introduced a co-sponsorship memorandum for legislation he is drafting that would require the Pennsylvania Department of State to restore information on Election Night that tells voters how many voting precincts have reported their data.

“The Department of State removed an election result transparency feature from their website about five years ago and I will soon introduce legislation to mandate its return,” Rose wrote in his memorandum. “The election returns portion of the Department of State website previously showed how many voting precincts there were and how many precincts had been counted. It also showed what percent of the precincts had reported. The Department of State still gets this information, but they removed it from their website so that citizens can no longer see it. My legislation would mandate that it be included again on their election return website.”

That information will be of interest not only to Pennsylvania residents this year, but to election watchers nationwide since Pennsylvania is widely regarded as an important battleground state in the presidential election. A recent Commonwealth Foundation Public found support for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is evenly divided in Pennsylvania, with Harris leading Trump 47% to 46% in a head-to-head ballot matchup.

When other candidates are added, Harris and Trump each garner 44% support, with independent Robert F. Kennedy at 6%, Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 1%, and Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver at 1%.

The survey interviewed 800 Pennsylvania voters between July 23 and July 25, 2024, following President Biden’s decision to leave the presidential race. The margin of error is ± 3.46.

It took nearly three weeks for Pennsylvania to certify its results in the 2020 election between Trump and President Joe Biden. Rose’s bill wouldn’t prevent that scenario from happening again, as the 2020 delay was largely caused by the weeks it took to count absentee and mail-in ballots that weren’t allowed to be opened and counted before Election Day 2020.

But, if the race is close on Election Night, Roae wants it to be easy for people to make their own decision on how much credence to give to the results they’re seeing.

“It was very transparent and easy to see if results were just starting to come in or if most of the results were already in,” Rose wrote. “Any citizen could easily evaluate if the outcome was still too early to tell since very few precincts were reported or if the candidate winning was likely to win since so few precincts remained to be counted. … If you saw a score of a baseball game but they did not tell you what inning it was or if you were watching a football game but they did not tell you how much time was left, knowing the score would not give much of an indication of who the likely winner would be. There is no valid reason for removing this important piece of information from the Department of State website.”