Why local officials are feeling 'on edge' as election day approaches

Why local officials are feeling 'on edge' as election day approaches

Al Schmidt is the chief election official in the state of Pennsylvania. President Trump's insults put him in danger during the 2020 ballot count. Now Schmidt talks about preparing for the midterms.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Our next guest, Al Schmidt, had a memorable experience in the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump has long claimed was stolen. Back then, Schmidt was the lone Republican on the three-member election board of Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. Schmidt helped supervise and publicly defended the integrity of the long and tedious count of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots. The count took days and eventually gave Democrat Joe Biden the state's 20 electoral votes. But it earned Schmidt nationally reported insults from then-President Trump and threats from some of his followers.

Today Schmidt is secretary of the commonwealth, the chief voting official for all of Pennsylvania, which will again be a critically contested state in a national election with high stakes for Donald Trump. There are four competitive congressional races in Pennsylvania, which could help decide control of the House of Representatives. We thought it would be useful to get Schmidt's take on this election season and what he expects and fears from the voting on November 3 and the count and certification to follow.

Before we begin, I should note that Al Schmidt and I have known each other for a long time. I was a political reporter for many years for the Philadelphia Daily News and public radio when Al was active in local Republican politics.

Al Schmidt, welcome to FRESH AIR.

AL SCHMIDT: Great to be back with you, Dave.

DAVIES: Let's spend a moment on that harrowing experience following the 2020 election. And to remind listeners, this was the first COVID election - right? - 2020, when mail ballots, normally not common in the United States, were all over the country. Back then, Philadelphia was typically used to processing about 13,000, 14,000...

SCHMIDT: That's right.

DAVIES: ...Absentee ballots. Now there were over 370,000 mail ballots. And the state election code prevented your election workers from even opening the envelopes until Election Day, which meant it was going to take a long time. It was expected that Donald Trump would be ahead on the machine vote because he had discouraged people from using mail ballots. Tell us what it was like to try and get all those ballots counted as quickly as you could.

SCHMIDT: Yes. And to help sort of set the scene here, you're right. It was the first election that Pennsylvania had with no-excuse mail-ballot voting, meaning any voter could vote by mail. Philadelphia also had essentially new voting systems in-person at the polls that election. We also had the COVID environment possibly at its peak, and we also had civil unrest in Philadelphia. So we were trying to manage our way through all of those different challenges.

With mail-ballot voting, we had about half of our voters, probably because of the COVID environment at the time, vote by mail. That's a lot in a presidential election with predictably very high turnout. But one thing that puts Pennsylvania at a disadvantage then and now is that our counties can't begin processing mail ballots until 7 a.m. on election morning. Other states begin that process days, if not weeks, in advance.

DAVIES: They can rip open the envelopes so that you're ready to process the ballots, right?

SCHMIDT: That's right. So on election night at 8 p.m., they're ready to report the results of what they had worked on for many days, if not weeks. In Pennsylvania, that's not the case. So in 2020, obviously, we had the in-person results coming in first - those are people who voted at the polls on Election Day - followed by these waves of updates for voting by mail as they were tabulated by our counties.

DAVIES: Right. So you would give regular updates on what the count of the mail ballot showed. And what was happening was you could see that Donald Trump's lead in the state was shrinking as more Democratic votes rather than Republican were reflected in the mail ballots. It got to a point where it got ugly and personal, didn't it? I mean, threats, right?

SCHMIDT: Yes. So we had had fairly general threats prior to that, like, you're going to get what's coming to you, or things that, you know, don't really rise to a level of concern for me, especially at this point. But as it went on, they certainly got a lot more specific, naming my children, providing my address in the threats, obviously graphic descriptions of the violence.

So I really relied on law enforcement - especially the Philadelphia Police Department, which did an incredible job and I'm always going to be grateful - for really taking care of my family. Like, we were inside the convention center. We had many, many police officers and sheriffs present outside. That's probably why threats were targeting your family, right? You're not there. It's all about trying to keep you from doing your job. So we couldn't allow ourselves to be distracted from doing our job because of the threats targeting our families.

DAVIES: Was your family relocated?

SCHMIDT: My family was relocated. And then we had around-the-clock police protection for many months after that because the threats continued, certainly leading up to the certification of the presidential election many weeks later. So when I walked the dog, police were coming with us. When we took the kids sledding, the police were there. It was just a constant presence.

DAVIES: Yeah. Yeah.

SCHMIDT: Thanksgiving, Christmas.

DAVIES: I don't...

SCHMIDT: And so...

DAVIES: ...Want to be - yeah.

SCHMIDT: ...Sort of surreal. I don't mean to laugh about it, but it was a surreal environment. And we got to, you know, know them pretty well. And I - like I said, I'm grateful.

DAVIES: So you're still a registered Republican. And...

SCHMIDT: I am.

DAVIES: You're serving a Democratic governor in a swing state. So here we are. And President Trump has been very, very active in warning that there will be fraud and that mail ballots are subject to fraud. And not just talking. I mean, he's tried to do things and get the government to do things which would affect the voting in this election. Give us a sense of the kind of incoming demands you have gotten from the federal government.

SCHMIDT: Well, there have been several, primarily from the Department of Justice and from the Department of Homeland Security. The biggest, of course, was a demand that we provide Pennsylvania's voter rolls to DOJ. And not just the publicly available voter rolls but the Social Security numbers of every registered voter in Pennsylvania that we have, every driver's license number and all the rest. So that's information that we are, obviously, typically prohibited from sharing. It would not be legal for us to share. And it was clear that we weren't going to provide that information, and we declined their demand.

That information has to be safeguarded. Nothing would jeopardize election integrity more than Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers being shared with multiple government agencies with unclear control over that sort of information. So we declined. The courts ruled in our favor, as they did in more than two dozen others at this point in these lawsuits against DOJ.

DAVIES: Right. I believe also, the Department of Justice told you that there were 14,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania. Do I have this right?

SCHMIDT: Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security. The accusation was that we have north of 14,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania because of whatever data matching, using whatever datasets in whatever way that led them to reach that conclusion.

DAVIES: This came your way when? Like, two months ago? Or...

SCHMIDT: Some months ago.

DAVIES: OK.

SCHMIDT: