Pa.’s top election official answers your questions about misinformation, voting machines, and more

This story originally appeared on Spotlight PA.

Ahead of the April 23 primary, Pennsylvania’s top election official answered your questions about misinformation, voting machine security, and more.

Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt joined Spotlight PA’s Kate Huangpu and Votebeat’s Carter Walker in March for a live event about building trust in elections. If you missed it, you can watch the conversation here.

Below are Schmidt’s answers to some of the questions asked during the event, as well as answers he sent via email to five of the questions we couldn’t get to.

Read his responses below, some of which have been condensed for space and clarity:

You called the departure of experienced local voting officials one of the biggest threats to our election. Can you talk a bit about the department’s new training for election officials? —Carter Walker, Votebeat

One of the biggest challenges that we’re facing not just in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but across the country is the turnover among the people responsible for running elections at the county level.

More than 70 have left in Pennsylvania since 2020 — and that’s a lot. And when you have people running elections, who have had little experience running elections, they’re more likely to make a mistake in election administration.

But when they do make mistakes, they’re interpreted as being intentional or malicious, or seeking to alter the outcome of the election for or against a candidate or campaign.

So the Department of State has created this year a new training team to provide training to election administrators across the commonwealth. Our sessions usually have between 50 and 100 election administrators at senior levels participating: ones who have been around for decades and ones who are brand new. It’s a service the Department of State is providing to make sure that newer people know what to do and what to prepare for.

I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the Election Threats Task Force, describing its role, its members, the information that’s being shared and how that will translate on Election Day. —Kate Huangpu, Spotlight PA

The Elections Threat Task Force is mainly designed to improve communication among people responsible for running elections and people responsible for law enforcement in the event we encounter any sort of ugliness like we encountered in 2020, and off and on, since 2020.

When all that came about in 2020 — and I was running elections at the county level and was on the receiving end of death threats, targeting myself and primarily targeting my family, targeting my young kids — we had to scramble to figure out what to do and how best to respond.

So the main purpose is to really open up lines of communications, to understand what everybody’s role is when it comes to running elections and when it comes to law enforcement.

Mis- and disinformation were a major source of confusion and interference in the 2020 election. I was hoping you could talk a bit about how the department is going to address those issues this year. —Carter Walker, Votebeat

Part of it is to make sure that you’re telling the truth about elections.

For me, it’s not about going back and forth with different parties and different people. It’s not about subjective differences of opinion on elections. It’s about whenever you encounter things that are categorically untrue, empirically untrue.

I think it’s a matter of understanding what questions are out there. And then when we do encounter things that are untrue, that are are intended to mislead voters from the truth about elections, then we need to make sure that we’re telling the truth about elections — that we provide accurate information.

It’s not about going back and forth. It’s not about arguing. It’s about telling the truth about elections and doing our part to make sure that voters are informed consumers of accurate, truthful election information.