Some people with integrity are attempting to stand up to Trunp's brownshirts and all of their threats.
Targeted with death threats, GOP election overseer now works to defend voter integrity
https://www.post-gazette.com/news/e...ath-threats-donald-trump/stories/202210230116
Al Schmidt, a former Republican Philadelphia commissioner, remembers the day he was singled out by the most powerful man in the world.
Then came the death threats.
For months, the 51-year-old civil servant was tasked with others in Philadelphia to oversee the process that would determine who would win the 2020 presidential election.
With 253 electoral votes already collected across the country for Joe Biden, Pennsylvania's 20 were critical.
Then came the tweet from President Donald Trump saying Mr. Schmidt was being “used” to cover up voter fraud. “He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption and dishonesty.”
Suddenly, a torrent of messages aimed at Mr. Schmidt and his family members would change their lives.
The attackers threatened his wife. One of them included the names and ages of their three children, and said they “will be fatally shot.” Another sent him a photo of his house.
“What was once a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children,” he told the U.S. Senate Rules Committee last October.
While vote counting was still underway in Philadelphia’s convention center in 2020, police rounded up two men from Virginia carrying an AR-15-style assault rifle and loaded handguns outside the building.
Mr. Schmidt has since resigned his post, but has now entered a new realm of politics.
For the past year, he and a growing number of others have been trying to convince people across the state to do whatever they can to protect a voting process that’s now under siege.
They are part of an expanding movement of people in the country who say they are fighting to break through misinformation about the integrity of voting systems and educate an increasingly skeptical public about the nuts and bolts of a process that has been an underpinning of American society since its founding.
In North Carolina, the once-obscure agency that oversees elections has a team dedicated to combating election lies that flow freely on social media. In Washington, The Brookings Institution is urging states to form quick-reaction teams that scour the internet for falsehoods and swoop in to debunk them before they explode into conspiracy theories.
For months, advocates have been pressuring social media giants to spend some of their vast profits to crack down on election lies.
Here in Pennsylvania, Mr. Schmidt, president of the public-interest advocacy group Committee of Seventy, joined with a Philadelphia journalist and two election experts on Wednesday in the first of three online events aimed at pulling back the curtain on elections.
In an age of chaos and doubt over elections, their goal of explaining the election process may have never been more important.
“You have to engage. You can’t just say ‘oh, well, let’s go back to another election,’ ” said Chris Borick, a pollster and political scientist at Muhlenberg College. "You’ve got a big section of the electorate that does not trust or accept the results.”
Nowhere is the public’s mistrust deeper than on mail ballots — which are now game changers in major elections across the country — the focus of Wednesday’s event.
Organized by the groups All Voting is Local, the Committee of Seventy and the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security, the program targeted some of the falsehoods that have led to violent threats against election workers in more than a dozen states.
The distrust has grown so deep that more than half of all voters believe mail voting poses a threat to democracy, and a third classify that threat as “major,” according to a New York Times/Sienna Poll released Tuesday. The vast majority of Republicans — 82% in all — say it’s a threat, compared to half of all independents and 27% of Democrats.
Nearly three in 10 voters don’t trust that the 2022 midterm election results will be accurate, the poll found. Among Republicans, that distrust is shared by 41% of voters.
In 2020, conspiracy theorists, election deniers and even foreign actors took isolated problems and spun a tale of widespread fraud that’s still told today.
“We saw that information blown out of proportion. We saw the compounding effect of spreading misinformation,” said Brendan Egan, a technology entrepreneur and cybersecurity expert.
“As each person spreads it, the story gets worse and worse and worse until you end up with one horrific story that the election was stolen.”
Attack on mail voting
Education projects aim to push back with hard facts, and in Pennsylvania, they’re starting with mail voting.
That practice underwent a sea change in the 2020 election, thanks to a sweeping reform of Pennsylvania’s election law enacted in 2019. Before the law, known as Act 77, took effect, Pennsylvanians needed a medical excuse or some other reason to cast their ballot by mail.
Now, any eligible voter can do so by mail.
At the time the law was passed, Republicans and Democrats alike hailed it as a rare bipartisan victory that would help generations of voters.
For the GOP, it was a way to lock in votes from elderly supporters who might have a hard time making it to the polls.
“People have been voting by absentee ballot in Pennsylvania at least as far back as the Civil War,” said Jefff Greenberg, who served as Mercer County’s elections director from 2007 through 2020 and took part in Wednesday’s event.
But as the 2020 election drew near, Mr. Trump, trailing in the polls, unleashed a fury against mail-in voting that would change the way Americans looked at elections.
The attacks by the president came just as mail voting was on a sudden, sharp rise across the country while COVID-19 ran rampant and health officials struggled to contain the deadly pandemic.
Suddenly, what had been a practice used by both parties became one more weapon in partisan warfare. Mr. Trump’s supporters echoed his baseless accusations that the mail-in votes were rife with fraud, and Republican politicians quickly flipped.
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, the GOP gubernatorial nominee who built a political following by amplifying the lies about the election, was attacked during his own primary this year as “Mail-in Mastriano” because he voted for Act 77.
He has since introduced legislation that would allow voters to repeal the reform.
“Mail voting has become this lightning rod,” Mr. Borick said. “People like the former president made it an issue. When you get a lot of cues from those who have big voices, it’ll have big impacts.”
Sixty-six percent of people who voted for Mr. Trump, and 62% of Republicans overall, still believe that he was the winner of the 2020 election, the Times/Sienna poll found.
“We should be worried,” said Mr. Borick. “One of the absolute glories of American democracy is that, while there’s bitter partisan fights, when the elections are over, it’s, ‘OK, these are our legitimate leaders.’ That doesn’t mean we have to like what they say, but we have to recognize them.
“These questions about [voting] process are impacting that legitimacy.”
Knocking down myths
For people like Mr. Schmidt, that starts with knocking down the myths that are now undermining elections.
Some of the problems are rooted in fundamental misunderstandings that fuel conspiracy theories and sow doubt about the security of mail voting. It can even be something as simple as a person getting more than one application for a mail ballot — which happens regularly when parties try to entice their supporters by sending applications to their homes.
All of a sudden, people are accusing election workers of letting people vote twice, but that doesn’t happen.
Regardless of how many times a person applies for a ballot, they only get one.
“There’s nothing magical about that piece of paper. It’s simply an application,” Mr. Schmidt said.
Filing an application triggers a multi-step process to verify a voter’s registration, and double check that they haven’t moved or died.
“We’re able to keep up with you and make sure we’re not mailing ballots to where they’re not supposed to go,” said Dori Sawyer, voter services director for Montgomery County and the third election official to speak Wednesday.
Nor can a voter return a mail ballot and then cast a regular ballot in person, she said.
“Every ballot return envelope has a bar code on it,” Ms. Sawyer said. Counties scan each envelope before they’re mailed.
“That triggers a couple of things.”
First, it updates the state-run ballot tracking system so the voter can keep tabs on their ballot’s whereabouts.
Second, it updates the county’s own records to ensure they can’t vote twice by coming into the polling station.
The biggest hole in the mail-voting process isn’t on the voter’s end — it’s in state law.
Pennsylvania is among a minority of states that doesn’t allow county election workers to begin processing mail ballots until the morning of the election.
In the run-up to that day, the ballots stream in, day after day, piling up in bins that collect the ballots for each voting district. There they wait, untouched, until state law says the county can get to work on them.
That’s when sparks can fly.
While ordinary county employees are carrying out critical — and often mind-numbing — work, politicians and partisans outside the election center’s walls rile up their supporters by accusing the workers of rigging the votes they’re just trying to count.
Consider just the first two steps that workers take to protect the sanctity of the votes. First they start by checking the outer envelope to make sure the voter signed and dated it. Then they open that outer envelope and pull out the secrecy envelope.
The secrecy envelopes are often moved elsewhere in the counting facility, where yet more poll workers slice them open, pull out the ballots, unfold and flatten them, and, finally, start feeding them into scanners.
All along the way, people representing candidates watch the scene unfold, looking for any hint of cheating.
“That whole, very mundane assembly line takes a lot of time,” Mr. Schmidt said. In Philadelphia in 2020, that process had to be repeated 375,000 times — once for every mail ballot the county received during the presidential election. Allegheny County had almost as many: 340,000.
It can delay the results of major races for days or even weeks.
The Associated Press didn’t call Pennsylvania for Mr. Biden until the Saturday after the election. By then, the vote count had been under withering attack by Mr. Trump and his allies all week, and his voters began pressuring elected officials to reject the results.
County leaders have for years been asking lawmakers in Harrisburg to allow them to do what 37 other states do: speed up the process by getting them ready for counting as they come in.
Lawmakers in Harrisburg failed to fix that problem, even though they were warned of the chaos it could cause in the run-up to the 2020 election and saw the corrosive aftermath.
‘This is domestic terrorism’
With two of the country’s highest-stakes races for governor and U.S. Senate — both of which have Trump-endorsed candidates who cast doubt on his 2020 defeat — some fear another delay could lead yet more Americans to falsely believe their elections are rigged.
“It’s a big problem with an easy solution,” Mr. Schmidt said.
“It’s frustrating to know we’re going to face it again in a couple of weeks.”
That can lead to real-world consequences for people laboring at a necessary job — something Mr. Schmidt knows all too well. The pressure is taking its toll. Since 2020, more than half of Pennsylvania’s counties lost at least one of their top election officials.
“I have three little kids,” Mr. Schmidt said told the Senate Rules Committee a year ago. “My youngest is seven years old. No matter what our party affiliation, this is not okay. And let’s be clear: this is domestic terrorism. The whole point is to terrorize.”
