HARRISBURG — In the Republican primary in Pennsylvania’s top-of-the-ticket election contest this year, one particular subject keeps coming up on the campaign trail: last year’s presidential election.

The campaign for an open state Supreme Court seat follows Donald Trump’s claims that November’s election was stolen and a parade of complaints by Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania about the actions of state elections officials and judges.

Paula Patrick, a Republican candidate, said voters primarily ask her about election integrity, and things like whether she believes the election was stolen from Trump or whether she agrees with court decisions in the case.

She doesn’t answer, she said, because these are issues that could come before the courts again.

“This election is on the heels of a very contentious election in 2020, so regardless of what I think of what happened in our election ... we know the issues surrounding that election were pretty hot,” Patrick said in an interview.

What she can do, however, is point voters to her background and experience, she said, as a judge on the Common Pleas Court bench in Philadelphia for 18 years, including a one-year appointment in 2015 to the city’s three-person election board.

“I let them know, experience matters,” Patrick said. “Having no experience in elections, or making decisions on elections, you may have difficulty in getting it right.”

Patrick is running against two other Republican judges — Kevin Brobson and Patricia McCullough, both sitting on Pennsylvania’s appellate-level Commonwealth Court — for the GOP nomination in the May 18 primary election. The lone Democrat seeking her party’s nomination is Maria McLaughlin, a judge on the appellate-level Superior Court.

They are aiming to replace the retiring Justice Thomas Saylor, a Republican on a court with a 5-2 Democratic majority.

In a race where election-related credentials are selling points, Brobson and McCullough handled several of the many lawsuits filed by Republicans in last fall’s election season as partisans slugged it out over gray areas of Pennsylvania’s fledgling mail-in balloting law.