Under Schmidt’s watch, the Department of State has also continued its year-round hotline to report voter intimidation and election fraud and a fact-checking Web page designed to combat disinformation and suspicion. “Prebunking is very valuable,” Schmidt told me. Despite Pennsylvania’s increased effort at transparency, however, election officials are making little headway in mitigating conspiratorial doubt. To combat claims that dead people were voting, officials in Cumberland County made a flowchart that showed how voter registration worked, from the time of registration to death, and how it was verified. “I appreciate scrutiny and I’m all in for transparency,” Jean Foschi, a Cumberland County commissioner, said. “But what’s very frustrating on my end is that someone will come in and they’ll ask a question and they don’t accept the factual answer.”
At the same time, voter-suppression groups have made numerous efforts to supposedly “clean up” voter rolls, including in Cumberland County, where a group of voters received letters, signed only with a first name, claiming that their registration appeared to be “incorrect.” Some letters went to current U.S. service members stationed elsewhere, and to retirees who’d moved to assisted-living facilities but remained in the county. “The form to return the letter was in our name,” Bethany Salzarulo, the director of elections in Cumberland County, told me. She had to spend hours on the phone reassuring voters that they hadn’t been purged from the rolls, and more hours explaining to those with suspicions that they were unfounded. “From when I started to now, there’s definitely a different sentiment out in the world,” Salzarulo, who has been working on elections in the county for the past twenty years, said. “We are no longer seen as doing this job that helps people. We’re the enemy now. It’s our fault if someone’s candidate doesn’t win.”
To make the technical process painstakingly clear, the Pennsylvania Department of State had printed a voluminous manual on how the process works. In addition, earlier this month, Cumberland County invited the public to come watch the logic-and-accuracy testing of the voting machines. Among those who came were members of Swamp the Vote, an election-denying outfit. Some of those attending the testing asked to touch the voting machine, a common request since 2020. In these cases, Foschi tries to explain that this is illegal, and would decertify the expensive machine immediately. Such demands have contributed to high turnover among election staffers: more than eighty senior election officials across the state have quit since 2020.
Many of these tactics of intimidation, disinformation, and suppression aren’t new; they’ve simply been sharpened in the past four years. In 2020, Pennsylvania faced more legal challenges related to voting than any other state. This year, such challenges have already begun. In June, the far-right group United Sovereign Americans sued Pennsylvania over alleged errors in the voter rolls. The case, which the Pennsylvania Department of State has called “a panoply of conspiracy,” remains pending in a federal district court. In September, six Republican members of Congress, all of whom voted against certifying the 2020 vote, filed suit in Pennsylvania, claiming that overseas ballots are vulnerable to fraud. (The case was dismissed in October by a federal judge.)
Many of those involved in obstructing the vote in 2020 still hold office, including fifteen county-level Board of Elections members who opposed or delayed certifying election results and five G.O.P. state officials who attempted to throw Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes to Trump in 2020. Such shenanigans will be harder to pull off now, thanks to the 2022 Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, a bipartisan effort at fixing problems in the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The new law, along with the Supreme Court decision Moore v. Harper, knocked out the most extreme aspects of independent-state-legislature theory—the notion that state lawmakers can choose their own electors. Yet Republican challenges to Pennsylvania voting could reach the U.S. Supreme Court before the electors’ deadline for certification, on December 17th. If the Court finds in their favor, that could overturn a Harris victory in the state. “It would be Bush v. Gore on steroids,” VanMiddlesworth said.
The most likely threat to democracy, in the end, is that Trump will win the election. For Al Schmidt, the stakes are personal. In 2020, Schmidt served as vice chair of the Board of Elections in Philadelphia, which helped to deliver Pennsylvania, and the Presidency, to Biden. Trump targeted Schmidt in a tweet on November 11, 2020, saying, “A guy named Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Commissioner and so-called Republican (RINO), is being used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia. He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty. We win!”
Schmidt and his family received death threats immediately. “We had to take a police officer with us to go to the grocery store and to go sledding,” he told me. In testimony before a Senate committee on threats to election administration, he said, “What was once a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children.”