Pa. election 2025: What you need to know before you vote
Here’s what voters should know before the commonwealth’s general election on Nov. 4, from voter deadlines to who’s on the ballot in Philadelphia and statewide.
3 months ago
Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio
Jennifer Schorn (left) is running on the Republican ticket to retain her current position as Bucks County District Attorney. Joe Khan is the Democratic nominee for Bucks County district attorney. (Courtesy of Bucks County government website; Courtesy of Joe Khan's campaign)
From Delco to Chesco and Montco to Bucks, what about life in Philly’s suburbs do you want WHYY News to cover? Let us know!
Bucks County residents are voting on five row offices in Pennsylvania’s 2025 general election. Among the races is the one for county district attorney. The winner will serve a four-year term.
The district attorney’s office prosecutes all criminal activity in the county, deciding whether or not to file charges, determining the severity of the charges, whether or not bail is required and, if so, how much. The office also creates or manages community-based crime prevention and diversion programs that offer alternatives to incarceration in certain cases.
Democrat Joe Khan is facing off against incumbent District Attorney Jennifer Schorn in this year’s race. Here’s everything you need to know about the candidates.
Joe Khan, 50, was born and raised in Northeast Philadelphia to a Pakistani Muslim father and a Catholic mother. His father immigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s.
Khan currently lives in the Doylestown area with his two children, ages 11 and 13.
A desire to “stand up for everybody,” Khan said, is what led him to pursue a career in the legal profession after graduating from Swarthmore College.
One law school professor in particular inspired Khan to see his cultural heritage as an advantage in his legal career, Khan told WHYY News.
“When I got to law school, I met a professor who had a really similar background,” he said. “He had a Muslim immigrant dad, a Christian American mom, and he was the one who helped me understand that this whole lifetime I’d had of building bridges between cultures and every conversation that I’d ever had in my life was not going to be some handicap I’d have to overcome as an attorney in the public interest. It would be my superpower, right? His name is Barack Obama, and with his guidance, I understood that where I was needed was back home.”
After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School, Khan returned to Philadelphia, where he worked as an assistant district attorney at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.
Khan then went on to work as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. In that role, he prosecuted corruption cases against officials in Allentown and Reading.
In 2017, he unsuccessfully ran for Philadelphia district attorney, and in spring 2024, Khan lost in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania attorney general to Eugene DePasquale.
In 2020, Khan was appointed as the first full-time Bucks County solicitor. In that role, Khan said he was “doing things that had never been done before to protect kids and to stand up against corporate greed and corruption and to defend our rights.”
Working with then-Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub, as county solicitor Khan brought a lawsuit in 2022 against manufacturers of PFAS that contributed to chemical contamination. In 2023, Khan and Weintraub filed a lawsuit on behalf of Bucks County against several social media companies for what the county alleged was their role in the growing teenage mental health crisis.
Khan said his partnership with Weintraub, a Republican, in filing those lawsuits is indicative of his bipartisan approach.
“We had political differences. They didn’t matter because we were united in our mission and our purpose in protecting Bucks County from these very, very dangerous harms,” Khan said.
Weintraub stepped down from his position as district attorney to become a Court of Common Pleas judge. Schorn, then an assistant district attorney in the county office, replaced him in January 2024.
Khan said he is running “because Matt Weintraub is no longer the DA.”
“We need to have a DA who’s going to stand up for truth, stand up for integrity and stand up for the rule of law,” he said. “We don’t have that now, but I’m running to make sure that my kids and every family in Bucks County has a DA who will do those things.”
Khan has criticized Schorn for her handling of abuse allegations at Jamison Elementary School in the Central Bucks School District. In April, Schorn said she would not press charges against the teacher and educational assistant who allegedly abused students in a special education classroom after her office conducted a “thorough review” of the case.
Khan said Schorn “refused” to “do a proper investigation.” In April, he called on her to convene a grand jury investigation of the allegations.
“The DA continued to say, ‘Well, I have an idea of what happened, but I’m not going to tell you what I learned.’ So we, as parents, we have no way to evaluate if criminal conduct happened, if no criminal conduct happened, is there a case to be made that the DA is just afraid to take because she might lose?” Khan told WHYY News. “Are there things that we need to do to make sure that this never happens again?”
Schorn told WHYY News in September that Khan is a “political animal” who is putting forth a narrative that is “not accurate.” She said she had her chief of child abuse [prevention] as well as two assistant district attorneys “extensively review” the case, and noted that her decision to press charges was the same conclusion reached by state Attorney General Dave Sunday.
“The hardest job as a prosecutor is that sometimes you make decisions and you can’t explain to the public why those decisions were made, because the law prevents you from doing so,” she said. “But I challenge anyone, I’ve been the toughest prosecutor on child physical and sexual abuse, I challenge anyone to suggest that my opponent, or, quite frankly, anyone who has their sights on running for district attorney in any county has that level of experience in child abuse. Why on earth would I not charge if the facts, when applied to the law were sufficient that charges were appropriate?”
Khan said more needs to be done to keep up with ghost guns and other criminal innovations. He also said there is “tremendous room for improvement” for the Bucks County District Attorney’s office to do more in the area of “public protection,” including prosecuting cases for consumers or the environment.
His role as a parent is his motivation for running for office, Khan said.
“Being a dad to my kids is the most important thing, and I want them to have a DA who’s going to keep them safe,” he said. “I want them to have a DA who wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night looking out for them, looking out for their classmates, looking out for their neighbors, looking out for everybody here. And that is the motivation that got me into this race, and that’s what’s going to propel us to victory.”
Khan’s endorsements include PA PPPA, IMPACT, API PA, NASW-PACE, EMGAGE, Jane Fonda Climate PAC, Sierra Club, TWU 234, Guardian Civic League, FOP Lodge 109, Clean Air, AFL-CIO, AFSCME DC 47, state Rep. Brian Munroe and Moms Demand Action.
Jennifer Schorn, 53, was born and raised in Upper Southampton Township in Bucks County.
She currently lives in Central Bucks with her husband and two children, a fifth grader and a first-year college student.
After receiving her law degree from Widener University, Schorn returned to Bucks County for a job as an assistant district attorney in 1999. She’s worked as a prosecutor in the county for more than 25 years, and was appointed first district attorney in 2021 after serving as the chief of trials and chief of the grand jury division.
She said she went to law school because she “wanted to advocate for crime victims and in particular, children, the most vulnerable among us.”
“I knew I wanted to be a prosecutor, and with a focus on child abuse, special victims prosecution,” she said, which includes cases involving crimes against people with cognitive impairments, older adults and children.
Schorn said the biggest challenge she’s faced since assuming the office in 2024 was transitioning from her full caseload as an assistant district attorney to leading the office.
In her first month on the job, while prosecuting a murder trial stemming from a previously unsolved 1991 homicide, Schorn faced questions about a much-publicized homicide, in which Levittown resident Justin Mohn was later found guilty of murdering his father.
“That was literally a true test of my commitment to the job,” she said. “Full circle, still being in the trenches in the courtroom, but being the leader of the office being able to reassure the public that they were safe and to answer any pertinent questions about the heinous crime that unfolded while on trial on another matter.”
Schorn said her priorities as district attorney are prosecuting child abuse and working in child abuse prevention.
She said her commitment to child abuse prevention, in part, came out of her experience prosecuting three separate cases from 2018 to 2019, each of which dealt with a 14-year-old girl who had been raped and murdered.
Though the victims were each from different parts of the county, and the circumstances surrounding their assaults and murders varied, Schorn said that pattern alone was a “wake-up call to the fact that we need to do more.”
“We need to try to catch individuals like this before they’re committing the unimaginable,” she explained.
When Schorn became district attorney in 2024, she said she more than tripled the resources dedicated to the office’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and strengthened partnerships with local police departments.
“In one year, we went from very proactive, to literally leading the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in arrest and prosecution for these types of crimes,” she said. “And I genuinely believe we are making a difference because we’re catching online predators communicating with child victims or exploiting child victims online.”
Schorn said as district attorney, she plans to continue to try cases. Working as a prosecutor for the county, she said, is “not about politics,” but is “more of a calling.”
“You sit there and think, ‘Well, yeah, this is horrific, and it’s hard, and the hours are long and the pay is not great, but if not me, then who,’” Schorn said. “If everybody used that excuse, then who’s there to hold the line, and we have the best job on Earth, because at the end of the day, this one guiding principle is do the right thing for the right reasons.”
If she wins the election in November, Schorn said, her priorities include continuing to strengthen the task force combating child abuse; fighting elder abuse; and combating violence by ramping up enforcement against illegal firearm and ghost gun trafficking.
“I’m running to continue my life’s mission,” she said. “And that is to continue to serve Bucks County and to make sure that this office continues in the path that we have been on, in making sure that every day justice is served, that we identify the most dangerous criminals and the people who should not be in the community, but also recognizing the lower level offenders where the goal is to … rehabilitate and reduce recidivism.”
Internally, Schorn said she is also working to increase salaries for assistant district attorneys to boost recruitment and retention.
“My ADAs are inadequately paid. They have to literally find alternative means to live in this county because they’re public servants,” she said. “And I’ve spent my career making those sacrifices, but it’s getting harder and harder for people.”
Bipartisanship is at the core of her remit as a prosecutor, Schorn said.
“Never once, not 25 years ago, or within the last year and a half, or almost two years, where I’ve been serving as district attorney, has politics ever entered into the equation,” she said. “And never will it, on a case, on a decision, on a commitment of resources, never once has it, nor will it ever. And I could line up countless victims of crime, witnesses and people who I’ve encountered throughout my career who would attest to that.”
Schorn’s endorsements include Bucks County law enforcement unions and entities, including specifically the Bucks County Chiefs of Police Association, the Bucks County FOP Lodge 50 and the PA State Troopers Association Lodge 40. Schorn is also endorsed by the Philadelphia Firefighters and Paramedic Union IAFF Local 22.
Get daily updates from WHYY News!
Sign up