This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s collaboration with Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting. Sign up for Votebeat’s free newsletters here.
By Carter Walker of Votebeat
After Donald Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020, he used Twitter to direct his fury straight at Al Schmidt, then a Philadelphia city commissioner, prompting a deluge of threats. Photos of Schmidt’s home were emailed to his family along with threatening messages, and they had to temporarily relocate for their safety.
The events around the 2020 election came to define Schmidt’s public persona. President Joe Biden went on to award him the Presidential Citizens Medal, Gov. Josh Shapiro selected him to oversee the state’s elections as secretary of the commonwealth, and Schmidt would spend the four years following the 2020 presidential contest defending the integrity of elections against attacks from Trump’s allies.
Earlier this month, Schmidt certified Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, and on Tuesday he presided over the ceremony that formally handed the state’s Electoral College votes to Trump.
Schmidt, who has a background in government auditing and more than a decade of experience in elections, can talk at length about the minutiae of election data analysis and the complexities of the law, but shies away from discussing his personal life.
While that life was arguably upended by Trump’s tweet in 2020, he had no qualms certifying Trump’s 2024 victory.
“I’m not a robot,” he said in an interview after certifying the election. “I’m well aware of what my family went through in 2020, but that doesn’t have any impact on my professional responsibilities to make sure that voters can make their voices heard in every election.”
In recent weeks, appointees to the incoming Trump administration, particularly prospective FBI director Kash Patel, have suggested investigating those who challenged Trump’s claims about the 2020 election or testified before the committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack. Asked if he was concerned about facing threats or investigations during a second Trump term, Schmidt expressed no concerns.
“I’m confident that the 2020 election in Pennsylvania was as free, fair, safe, and secure as the 2024 election,” he said. “When you’re on the right side of the law, you really have nothing to be concerned about.”
Pennsylvania returns to a tradition of routine elections
Pennsylvania’s election was not as hectic, or close, as had been expected. Trump won the state by a 1.71% margin — the largest since Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection victory over Mitt Romney.
Because of that margin, Tuesday’s Electoral College vote was a muted affair, unlike four years ago when alternate electors for Trump met to cast their votes in several swing states as part of an alleged effort to overturn his loss.
Tuesday’s proceeding suggests 2020’s event was an aberration, not the new norm.
The commonwealth has participated in every Electoral College since the first one in 1789.
“The 10 participating states unanimously elected George Washington, the nation’s first president,” said Schmidt, who holds a doctorate in history from Brandeis University. While “such unanimity is rare today,” Schmidt said, most people agree that preserving democratic traditions “is a sacred responsibility.”
This year, Pennsylvania returned to that tradition. The most dramatic moment of the Electoral College vote was the replacement of an elector who needed to attend the birth of his child. That happened without fanfare. Because Shapiro was running late, Schmidt was forced to read the governor’s intended speech. He thanked himself, therefore, for a well-run election, leading to laughs from attendees.
Many administrators and election observers were prepared for various worst-case scenarios, on Election Day and the following weeks, that did not materialize. Counties increased security measures for staff to cope with hostility directed toward election workers in the past few years. The state Supreme Court shortened timelines for court cases so that protracted disputes would not interfere with election deadlines. Outside groups, like Informing Democracy and Protect Democracy, warned of the risks of county officials declining to certify results, a scenario the Department of State had prepared for as well.
Turnover among county-level election administrators also raised concern that the loss of institutional knowledge would lead to administrative errors that could be used to sow doubt in the results.
“I wouldn’t be doing my job if I weren’t anxious about everything,” Schmidt said. But he said that anxiety is a good thing — it focuses his attention.
Few of his worries materialized. Counties and the state certified the election well ahead of the federal deadline. Post-election litigation popped up — mostly surrounding the close U.S. Senate race — but it was quickly resolved. Local election administrators mostly avoided making errors.
More smoke than fire
Election Day did see some uncertainty. Cambria County in central Pennsylvania discovered that its tabulators couldn’t scan the county’s ballots, which had been misprinted; in southwestern Fayette County, a local polling place worker said they would hand-count ballots, which would have delayed results; and bomb threats were called into several counties around the state.
“Imagine you are a firehouse, receiving lots of fire calls,” Schmidt said on election night between updates to the public. “You’ve got to figure out which one is real and which isn’t quickly.”
When the smoke cleared, no real fires were revealed.
A county judge barred the Fayette poll worker from hand counting. The bomb threats, while they caused some delay, did not prove legitimate or significantly hamper county operations.
In Cambria County, voters continued to cast ballots, and more votes were cast there in the presidential contest than in any other presidential election in the past two decades.
“Election Day is always bumpy,” Schmidt said. But the election was “free, fair, safe and secure.”
“I think that was a real success, especially given the amount of turnover among election administrators in Pennsylvania and across the country.”
Signs of growing trust in the election
Polling from the Pew Research Center released earlier this month showed that nearly 9 in 10 U.S. voters felt the election was run very or somewhat well, which represents a 30% gain over a similar study done after the 2020 election.
Repeating an oft-used saying by election officials, Schmidt said before Election Day that administrators will “pray for high turnout and wide margins,” so that disputes can be avoided.
But he also credits election officials for making themselves available to the public to explain the process and answer questions when they arose.
Schmidt has made clarifying the election process for the public a main focus of his job. In the months leading up to the election, he did dozens of interviews with print, radio, and broadcast media, and participated in public forums where any citizen was free to ask questions.
“How many people are you convincing? I don’t know,” he said. “But what I do know is you have a professional obligation to answer people’s questions, to not run and hide when the truth is on your side.”
The duty goes beyond just answering questions, Schmidt said. Every election official he has encountered understands “the sacred responsibility” they have to run fair elections and takes care to separate their personal and political opinions from that responsibility. And if they can’t do that, he said, “then you really have no business being involved in election administration.”
Whether the increased trust in elections sticks is still an open question. While the public’s confidence may have increased, there were still pockets of doubt in the post-election period that raise concerns. Republicans pointed to votes taken by boards of elections to count undated mail ballots as an attempt to steal the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania; some liberals turned toward conspiracy theories to explain Kamala Harris’ loss; and Trump and his allies haven’t abandoned the notion that the 2020 election was stolen.
“I think everyone, including myself, took for granted the stability of our electoral process in the United States, and that was shaken a little bit in 2020,” Schmidt said. “We should be grateful to see the resurgence in confidence in our democratic process. But we shouldn’t take it for granted. We saw just several years ago that that can be easily shaken.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
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