The term “red teaming” derives from the war games that U.S. officials conducted during the Cold War to prepare for catastrophic attacks against American interests. In the run-up to the Presidential election, think tanks have been executing countless such exercises. So has the state of Pennsylvania, which has an election-threat task force that includes officials from the governor’s office, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA). For most of this year, the task force met once a month to share information and to spend half a day gaming out what might go wrong. In October, it began meeting once a week.
In an overwhelming majority of scenarios, the path to the Presidency runs through Pennsylvania: both candidates have few ways to win without its nineteen Electoral College votes. As a result, state officials are preparing for multiple possible disruptions. The most dramatic, and least likely, scenario involves a large-scale natural disaster or a violent attack on November 5th. “The goal of the tabletop exercises is to understand who the players are so we’re not meeting on Election Day,” Randy Padfield, the director of PEMA, told me. His agency’s principal role on November 5th is to, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, run an Election Day dashboard that will share information about any impediments to voting, from road accidents to intentional violence.
“When something wicked this way comes, it’s really a matter of, Are we prepared for it or not?” Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, told me on a recent evening, in Harrisburg. Schmidt, a fifty-three-year-old Republican with snowy, slicked-back hair and horn-rimmed glasses, was there taking part in a public meeting to quell fears and answer questions about the coming election. Pennsylvania poses a unique set of security challenges. “A lot of these rural counties have never had to think about crowd control,” Ari Mittleman, of Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan group that works on election integrity, told me. According to election analysts, such threats could involve cyberattacks, foreign interference, or injecting bad actors into the election process as poll watchers, or, more dangerously, as workers. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, an ardent group of Christian nationalists affiliated with the Dallas televangelist Lance Wallnau has been running a training program called Fight the Fraud, which recruits poll workers among “Christian patriots who want their voices heard.”
The risk is that such actors, convinced that the election is being stolen, will arrive at polling places determined to disrupt it. Earlier this month, on the steps of the state capitol, in Harrisburg, Sean Feucht, a self-avowed Christian nationalist and evangelical singer-songwriter, invoked Donald Trump’s January 6th rallying cry. “It’s time to get wild in America,” he said to a crowd of some hundred people, including Doug Mastriano, a Stop the Steal leader and former G.O.P. candidate for governor, who bused supporters to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. Organizers hawked “An Appeal to Heaven” flags, which rioters carried during the siege on the U.S. Capitol; one was also famously flown outside Justice Samuel Alito’s New Jersey beach house. On October 30th, Trump told his followers that state authorities were already committing election fraud. “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before,” he wrote on Truth Social. “REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”
To thwart potential attacks, many Pennsylvania counties have increased security at voting precincts and at facilities where ballots are stored. Philadelphia’s election commissioners have moved the count from the Pennsylvania Convention Center to a secure warehouse in northeast Philadelphia, after two armed men arrived from Virginia, in 2020, seeking to insure “legitimate” votes. “This is the first election we’re going into where the belief of widespread fraud is rampant,” Rex VanMiddlesworth, a legal expert and board member of Keep Our Republic, told me.
November 5th is only the beginning. Many of the potential threats to election integrity are likely to occur in the days between the election and the Inauguration on January 20th. In the event of a victory for Kamala Harris, this is the period of time in which Trump attorneys and supporters may launch targeted attempts to unseat her. In Pennsylvania, all sixty-seven counties must legally certify the results by November 25th. Four years ago, Republican commissioners in three counties—Lancaster, Berks, and Fayette—refused to certify the vote, which may happen again. This possibility, however, doesn’t alarm Schmidt.“We’ll sue them,” he said, noting that, in 2020, Pennsylvania filed a court order forcing the counties to certify, and the vote proceeded. (In Fulton County, the G.O.P. commissioners went further. They launched their own audit, opening the voting machines and allowing an I.T. company to access the system. As a result, a Pennsylvania court ordered the county and its attorney to pay a million-dollar fine.)
For Schmidt, a greater concern is that, if the election is close, another Stop the Steal movement might take hold, which could jeopardize the process on two remaining dates: December 17th, when electors convene in each state to select the President and Vice-President and certify the results, and January 6th, when Congress meets to certify the vote. Dispelling disinformation about the voting and counting processes has become one of the most important aspects of Schmidt’s job. “We’re in an environment where anything could be interpreted as being intentional and malicious and seeking to alter the outcome of the election,” he said. One complication is that the outcome in Pennsylvania may not be certain for days. The state’s law only allows mail-in ballots to be opened and processed beginning at 7 A.M. on Election Day. Those mail-in ballots, which a week before the election already numbered in the millions, could ultimately help to determine the Presidency.
“We are at a unique disadvantage,” Schmidt said. “When people hear about delays in Pennsylvania, it’s not a delay at all.” To speed up the count and to improve the system, in 2022, the state passed Act 88, which distributed forty-five million dollars to counties in exchange for their agreement to process ballots around the clock until the count is completed. Voting machines that provide paper receipts for every electronic vote are in use in every county in Pennsylvania. “The best protection is having a paper record of every ballot,” Kevin Skoglund, the president and chief technologist of the nonprofit group Citizens for Better Elections, told me. “Every county in Pennsylvania will audit the paper records after the election, and any candidate can ask for a recount if they doubt the results.”
Under Schmidt’s 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. “Prebunking is very valuable,” Schmidt told me. Despite Pennsylvania’s 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. “I appreciate scrutiny and I’m all in for transparency,” Jean Foschi, a Cumberland County commissioner, said. “But what’s very frustrating on my end is that someone will come in and they’ll ask a question and they don’t accept the factual answer.”
At the same time, voter-suppression groups have made numerous efforts to supposedly “clean up” 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 “incorrect.” Some letters went to current U.S. service members stationed elsewhere, and to retirees who’d moved to assisted-living facilities but remained in the county. “The form to return the letter was in our name,” Bethany Salzarulo, the director of elections in Cumberland County, told me. She had to spend hours on the phone reassuring voters that they hadn’t been purged from the rolls, and more hours explaining to those with suspicions that they were unfounded. “From when I started to now, there’s definitely a different sentiment out in the world,” Salzarulo, who has been working on elections in the county for the past twenty years, said. “We are no longer seen as doing this job that helps people. We’re the enemy now. It’s our fault if someone’s candidate doesn’t win.”
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.
Many of these tactics of intimidation, disinformation, and suppression aren’t new; they’ve 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 “a panoply of conspiracy,” 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.)
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’s 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, knocked out the most extreme aspects of independent-state-legislature theory—the 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’ deadline for certification, on December 17th. If the Court finds in their favor, that could overturn a Harris victory in the state. “It would be Bush v. Gore on steroids,” VanMiddlesworth said.
The most likely threat to democracy, 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 on November 11, 2020, saying, “A 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!”
Schmidt and his family received death threats immediately. “We had to take a police officer with us to go to the grocery store and to go sledding,” he told me. In testimony before a Senate committee on threats to election administration, he said, “What was once a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children.”
Despite these risks, when Governor Josh Shapiro asked Schmidt, in the winter of 2022, to take on the role of secretary of state, with the pivotal job of certifying the results of the state’s election, he said yes. “There wasn’t a moment of hesitation by me or my family, knowing fully well what that could possibly entail in the present environment,” he told me. He got to work creating Pennsylvania’s fact-checking Web page and began a tour of all sixty-seven counties to talk to voters about the election, often eschewing his usual suit for a button-down shirt and ball cap.
This newly public role is uncomfortable for Schmidt. “No one gets involved in election administration with an expectation of having public engagement,” he said. “Everyone is extremely introspective, including myself.” He referenced the adage that, the day after the Super Bowl, no one wants to read about the referees. The situation is different, he added, when the fairness of the game comes into question: “The referee now has to take a public role to reassure the public that the rules are followed.”
At the recent community meeting at Widener University, in Chester, he nursed a Diet Coke, and tried to mollify voters’ concerns.
“Do you see any hacking threats?” the panel’s mediator asked, reading an audience member’s question off of an index card.
“No voting system is connected to the Internet,” he said. “They are no more hackable than this glass of water.” He pointed to the plastic bottle next to his soda can.
“What checks are in place to make sure those that register to vote and appear to vote are U.S. citizens?” the mediator continued.
Somewhat startlingly, as Schmidt responded to this question, he began to cry. As secretary of state, he had launched an investigation into the issue of non-citizens voting. What he found, he said, was a small number of cases in which non-citizens had simply checked the wrong box when applying for a driver’s license, not understanding that they weren’t eligible for voter registration. No matter the intent, this constituted voter fraud, which was a crime. “It’s considered low moral character and you’re deported,” he said, choking up. “Sorry,” he added. Schmidt had testified at those individuals’ deportation hearings so that judges would understand what had happened. “You’d be lucky to have any of these people as your neighbor,” he later told me.
For Schmidt to fulfill his professional duties, he and his family have attempted to put some of the difficulties of 2020 aside.“The whole point of those threats of violence and intimidation is to get you to not do your job,” he told me.“You can’t let that control what you do.” This includes thinking too much about the outcome. If Trump is elected, then Schmidt will see to it that the man who incited violence against him becomes the forty-seventh President. “I think we take democracy for granted and don’t appreciate how very fragile it is,” he said. “It has within itself the mechanism for its own destruction. If the will of the people is to dismantle their system of government, then, in a democracy, they have that ability.” ♦
