Trump told supporters in December to “guard the vote” and to “go into” Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta to “watch those votes when they come in.”

Shapiro — who as attorney general played a central role in defending Pennsylvania’s 2020 election against Republican efforts in court to overturn it — has said that administration officials were preparing for the election on legal, law enforcement and election administration fronts.

Shapiro’s Department of State is putting more resources into countering election misinformation and is improving the connectivity and processing speed of the state’s digital voter registration database that counties use daily.

It created a unit to train county election workers and tried to standardize mail-in ballots to cut down on the garden-variety mistakes by registered voters that nevertheless have spawned countless lawsuits.

The election is likely to be close.

Complicating it is a state law that prohibits counties from processing mail-in ballots before Election Day — raising the specter of another drawn-out count in Pennsylvania like the one in 2020 that gave a window to Trump-inspired conspiracy theories and false claims.

Nearly every other state allows mail-in ballots to be processed before Election Day.

In recent weeks Schmidt — himself a former Philadelphia election official who has told of enduring death threats for defending the city’s 2020 vote-counting against Trump’s lies — has said that a wave of experienced administrators departing county election offices is a threat to elections.

About 70 senior county election officials in the 67 counties have left recently, Schmidt told a Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon on Monday. Inexperience gives rise to mistakes that are seized on to sow doubt about elections, Schmidt said.

Any mistake, “especially in an environment where any mistake, no matter how innocent, is so easily interpreted as being intentional and malicious and seeking to change the outcome of an election,” Schmidt said.