By Ron Beitler and Sarah Fevig
This November, Lehigh County voters will decide whether to change who has a seat at the table when election decisions are made.
If voters say yes, the Election and Registration Commission would grow from three members to five, with no single party holding an inherent advantage. Any resident would be able to apply to serve without being nominated by a party chair.
The election commission certifies Lehigh County’s election results, but its responsibilities begin long before Election Day. The commission makes consequential decisions involving polling places, ballot drop boxes and ballot challenges. Most recently, the election commission was the decision maker on whether Lehigh County should add five ballot drop boxes, while funding approval rested with the Board of Commissioners.
Those responsibilities are why the members of the election commission matters.
The election commission has not been updated since 1986. Since then, Lehigh County’s population has grown by approximately 37%, from about 280,000 residents to more than 384,000 today. That growth is expected to continue. The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission projects the region will add more than 100,000 residents by 2050, an increase of nearly 19%.
The political makeup of the county has changed as well. Voters outside the Democratic and Republican parties now represent 1 in 5 Lehigh County voters, according to county records. In 1998, they made up approximately 11%.
This mirrors a broader national shift in political identification. Gallup reported that a record 45% of U.S. adults identified politically as independents in 2025. While national political self-identification differs from county voter registration, both trends demonstrate how much the political landscape has evolved.
The referendum responds to these changes through three critical reforms.
If voters approve the referendum, the election commission would expand from three voting members to five, with no single political affiliation holding a majority.
Importantly, the proposed charter language does not permanently reserve seats for Democrats, Republicans or independents. Instead, two seats would be assigned to each of the county’s two largest registered voter groups and one seat to the third-largest group. Based on today’s registration, that would mean two Democrats, two Republicans and one independent/no-affiliation member.
The seats would be determined through an annual review of Lehigh County voter-registration records. If Lehigh County’s political make-up changes, the election commission membership would change with it, evolving as voter registration changes. That would makes it the first election board of its kind in Pennsylvania.
The referendum would create another path for residents to serve.
Party chairs could still recommend candidates for seats, but a party-chair nomination would no longer be the only way to be considered. Eligible Lehigh County residents who meet the required affiliation and two-year registration requirements could apply directly.
Candidates would then be considered through public interviews. The Lehigh County Board of Commissioners, conducting the appointment process, would choose at least one party-recommended candidate, but the other seat could be filled with a candidate from the open application. This process preserves a role for political parties while opening participation to any qualified resident.
The proposed structure would also remove the county executive as a voting member of the election commission, creating a five-member citizen board.
The executive or a designee would remain involved as a nonvoting member. This maintains an important connection between the commission and county administration, including the elections office and other county functions necessary to carry out the commission’s decisions, without giving a sitting elected executive a vote on the commission itself.
Our executive supports this proposed structure, and we appreciate that support. But this amendment isn’t designed around who occupies that office today. It is designed for whoever occupies it tomorrow — and decades from now.
That distinction is why the two of us support this change.
We come to county government from different political backgrounds. Commissioner Beitler previously served as a Republican and, now having gone independent, has no affiliation. Commissioner Fevig is a Democrat. We certainly don’t agree on everything, nor should we. But we agree on this: The rules governing our elections should work regardless of who’s holding power now or who’s holding power 10 or 20 years from now.
Political majorities change. Elected officials change. Party registration changes. Lehigh County itself will continue to change. The structure overseeing our elections should be capable of enduring those changes without depending on which party happens to hold power at a particular moment.
Those are the ideas we kept coming back to as this proposal developed.
The test of a good election system isn’t whether you trust the people running it today. It’s whether you’d trust the structure if the people you opposed were running the government tomorrow.
This is a contributed opinion column. Ron Beitler and Sarah Fevig are Lehigh County commissioners. The views expressed in this piece are those of its individual author(s), and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of this publication. For more details on commentaries, read our guide to guest opinions at mcall.com/opinions.