{"id":3233,"date":"2025-10-16T03:52:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T03:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/3233\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T03:52:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T03:52:24","slug":"safeguarding-the-pennsylvania-election-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/3233\/","title":{"rendered":"Safeguarding the Pennsylvania Election | The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Under Schmidt\u2019s 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. \u201cPrebunking<\/a> is very valuable,\u201d Schmidt told me. Despite Pennsylvania\u2019s 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. \u201cI appreciate scrutiny and I\u2019m all in for transparency,\u201d Jean Foschi, a Cumberland County commissioner, said. \u201cBut what\u2019s very frustrating on my end is that someone will come in and they\u2019ll ask a question and they don\u2019t accept the factual answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, voter-suppression groups have made numerous efforts to supposedly \u201cclean up\u201d 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 \u201cincorrect.\u201d Some letters went to current U.S. service members stationed elsewhere, and to retirees who\u2019d moved to assisted-living facilities but remained in the county. \u201cThe form to return the letter was in our name,\u201d Bethany Salzarulo, the director of elections in Cumberland County, told me. She had to spend hours on the phone reassuring voters that they hadn\u2019t been purged from the rolls, and more hours explaining to those with suspicions that they were unfounded. \u201cFrom when I started to now, there\u2019s definitely a different sentiment out in the world,\u201d Salzarulo, who has been working on elections in the county for the past twenty years, said. \u201cWe are no longer seen as doing this job that helps people. We\u2019re the enemy now. It\u2019s our fault if someone\u2019s candidate doesn\u2019t win.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Many of these tactics of intimidation, disinformation, and suppression aren\u2019t new; they\u2019ve 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 \u201ca panoply of conspiracy,\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/a>, knocked out the most extreme aspects of independent-state-legislature theory<\/a>\u2014the 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\u2019 deadline for certification, on December 17th. If the Court finds in their favor, that could overturn a Harris victory in the state. \u201cIt would be Bush v. Gore on steroids,\u201d VanMiddlesworth said.<\/p>\n

The most likely threat to democracy<\/a>, 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<\/a> on November 11, 2020, saying, \u201cA 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!\u201d<\/p>\n

Schmidt and his family received death threats immediately. \u201cWe had to take a police officer with us to go to the grocery store and to go sledding,\u201d he told me. In testimony before a Senate committee on threats to election administration, he said, \u201cWhat was once a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Under Schmidt\u2019s watch, the Department of State has also continued its year-round hotline to report voter intimidation and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[34,2954,2955,1586,28,30,29,2956,1824],"class_list":["post-3233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-donald-trump","tag-election-2024","tag-election-fraud","tag-kamala-harris","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-presidential-race","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}