As November approaches, top election officials around the country are sharing critical information with voters, in part to combat any disinformation that may arise around the voting process or how votes are counted.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt knows the personal impact of disinformation all too well. The Republican was personally named and accused by former President Donald Trump of ignoring unfounded claims of corruption and fraud in the 2020 elections in Philadelphia while he served as a city commissioner. Death threats and harassment followed.
RELATED STORY | Truth be Told: How AI is posing a new disinformation threat this election
During a recent visit to Washington D.C., Schmidt spoke with Scripps News’ Disinformation Desk about his method of debunking false information — acknowledging that elected officials around the country have different approaches to this. Schmidt says he closely monitors the disinformation to “make sure we're sharing accurate information parallel to the sort of things that we see intending to deceive voters.”
“It's usually, in my experience, orchestrated,” Schmidt said of the disinformation targeting voters. “And what you'll see is something pretty widespread being shared out there, particularly in social media platforms, intending to undermine confidence based on one or another thing that has no basis in fact whatsoever.”
Schmidt also weighed in on a topic that Congressional Republicans have been focused on: allegations that noncitizens are registering to vote in Pennsylvania and across the country.
“There's no evidence of it whatsoever. So, every day you get that question, despite the fact that there's no evidence of it at all because it's not occurring,” Schmidt said. “Pennsylvania dealt with this issue in 2016 and 2017. I was very involved. I ran elections as a Republican in Philadelphia. I was very concerned and always am about voter fraud and voting irregularities, because you always have to be vigilant.”
RELATED STORY | Female election workers face growing threats as disinformation flourishes
Schmidt said he worked with the Pennsylvania Department of State to deal with an issue where noncitizens “extremely, extremely infrequently” were being registered to vote through what was called “motor voter.”
“Since then, for many years now, non-citizens do not get registered to vote or do not encounter any opportunity to register to vote when getting a driver's license in Pennsylvania.”
Starting in February of this year, Schmidt began leading the Pennsylvania Election Threats Task Force that Governor Josh Shapiro set up to monitor threats to election workers.
“Election misinformation and disinformation does a great harm, not just to confidence in elections, but also because it sometimes motivates people to act out accordingly and to, unfortunately, make threats of violence or intimidation, targeting voters or election workers.”
Schmidt describes a partnership between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies in addition to the people responsible for running elections in the state to keep an eye on what’s going on if misinformation gets traction that develops into threats.
“In 2020, it was new to a lot of us, right. That threat environment was different than anything anyone encountered before. So there's a lot of lessons learned from that. And working with law enforcement and other partners, we can be sure to be prepared should any of that ugliness return in 2024.”
RELATED STORY | FBI, election officials concerned about security of the 2024 election
When asked if he was worried that election disinformation could lead to physical violence, Schmidt said it’s always a concern.
“You have you have people who are very well-intentioned, and you have people who undoubtedly are even sincerely concerned about elections or have questions about election integrity and we need to answer their questions. But the unfortunate thing is they're being fed so much misinformation and so much disinformation that is exploiting their good intentions, that it is exploiting their sincere commitment. And we've seen that a lot,” Schmidt says. “People seem to be so eager to consume so much information that it is at times incomprehensible and indulging in a paranoid fantasy of a stolen election, that, you know, has no basis in fact whatsoever.”
And with Pennsylvania’s importance as a top swing state, Schmidt is reminding political junkies to have some patience when it comes to vote tallies and results in the state because election officials across Pennsylvania cannot begin processing mail in ballots until Election Day. The process he’s describing, dubbed mail-in ballot pre-canvassing, was on full display in 2020, but efforts in the state legislature to change laws around this sticking point have proved fruitless in the past few years. It’s what he calls a technical problem with a technical solution that can be very easily fixed.
“Mail-in ballot pre-canvassing, as mundane as that sounds, is really very important to get votes counted as quickly as you can while maintaining the integrity of the process. When you do that, voters know the results earlier.”
