Aug 29, 2024 By Brad Hundt 4 min read

Al Schmidt is a native of Pittsburgh and a former Philadelphia city commissioner, so he is very familiar with Pennsylvania’s two biggest cities.

Lately, Schmidt has been becoming acquainted with a lot of the territory in between.

Appointed secretary of the commonwealth by Gov. Josh Shapiro in 2023, Schmidt is Pennsylvania’s top elections official, and he’s been traveling to elections offices in each of the state’s counties to talk with other officials before the Nov. 5 vote. On Wednesday, he crossed Washington and Greene counties off the list, with 23 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties still to go.

“Each county is different and each county faces different challenges,” Schmidt explained in an interview at the office of the Observer-Reporter in Washington. “There are certain things that all election administrators face – mail-in ballots, which without a doubt has improved accessibility, has been a heavy lift for a lot of counties.”

Schmidt was propelled into the national spotlight in 2020 when, as the only Republican on Philadelphia’s municipal elections board, he did not support claims by President Donald Trump that the city’s vote in that year’s presidential election was rife with fraud. Schmidt dismissed the assertions by Trump and his associates as “completely ridiculous” and “fantastical.” Schmidt later testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the events leading up to it that he and his family were subject to harassment and threats after Trump attacked him on Twitter.

Schmidt pointed out “it was not unique to me. It was Democrats and Republicans in big cities and rural counties across the country who had to deal with that in 2020 and beyond.” He said an election threats task force established by the Shapiro administration earlier this year “will be ready to make sure that people are safe and feel safe.”

Washington County’s elections and how they are run have recently become a flashpoint following a decision by the county’s commissioners earlier this year to not allow voters to “cure” mail-in ballots if they make minor errors on them. Last Friday, Judge Brandon Neuman of the Washington County Court of Common Pleas ruled that voters should be notified if they have made mistakes on mail-in ballots and be allowed to cast a ballot provisionally.

“Washington County, in my experience, has run elections very well,” Schmidt said. He noted that there is not a statewide standard on ballot curing, so some counties offer it and some don’t “and it’s acceptable for either option under the law.”

Schmidt added, “We obviously encourage counties to provide as many options to voters so those voters can cast their votes and have their vote counted.”

He acknowledged that different rules in different counties cause “a lot of confusion for voters, and that there’s a real need for some flexibility from county to county. But you want to minimize situations where a ballot is counted in one county but not in another county, And that’s obviously an issue for the Legislature to decide, whether it’s ballot curing, whether it’s drop boxes, whether it’s board of elections satellite offices or anything else. There’s a lot of variety in how elections are run, though they are all run within the confines of Pennsylvania law.”

A fix Schmidt would like to see the Legislature make to Pennsylvania’s elections is allowing elections officials to “pre-canvass” mail-in ballots before Election Day. It would let vote counters get a head start on the process by opening the envelopes that contain the ballots, and then flattening the ballots themselves. Proponents say pre-canvassing would allow election results to be known much more quickly. Because pre-canvassing was not allowed in the 2020 presidential election, Pennsylvania was not called for Joe Biden until four days after Election Day because of the slow process of counting mail-in ballots.

Pre-canvassing “does not benefit any party, it does not benefit any candidate, but it would allow boards of elections to begin that process,” Schmidt said. “Plenty of red states do it, plenty of blue states do it. It’s no issue in any state, red or blue. … It’s a known problem, it’s a technical problem with a technical solution.”

And with the election coming up in just two months, what does Schmidt tell voters who might believe the whole process is fraudulent or “rigged”?

“Elections have changed a lot in the last several years. And it’s no surprise that people have a lot of questions. And it’s our responsibility to answer those questions. But it’s also important that when people are asking the question, they’re actually interested in the answer to that question, as opposed to asking the question to undermine confidence in elections, which we see all too often.”