In announcing the formation of a Pennsylvania Election Threats Task Force, Gov. Josh Shapiro charged its members with “working together to combat misinformation, safeguard the rights of every citizen, and ensure this election is safe, secure, free, and fair.”
Note that Shapiro listed fighting misinformation first in the task force’s to-do list, not pursuing allegations of stuffed drop boxes, hacked voting machines or counterfeit absentee ballots trucked in from out of state. For good reason. None of those things actually happened in the last presidential election, as proven in numerous court cases and the routine auditing processes state law imposes on county election bureaus.
Misinformation coming from what Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt calls “bad-faith actors” lies at the root of the stubborn mistrust of our voting systems in Pennsylvania and nationwide. And that misinformation and mistrust are inflicting real damage by driving out qualified, experienced election officials worn down by the intense scrutiny and hostility coming from those who refuse to accept the validity of the 2020 election.
Schmidt, a former Philadelphia election official who was the target of death threats for defending that city’s vote count in 2020, recently told the Pennsylvania Press Club that about 70 senior election officials in the Commonwealth’s 67 counties have recently resigned or retired.
That type of turnover can bleed an election bureau of institutional memory, leading to mistakes that once would have been written off as human error but are now attributed to dark forces aiming to alter voting results.
In Luzerne County, for instance, which has had four election directors in 4½ years, a shortage of paper needed to print out ballots in November 2022 led to delays at the polls and a gratuitous seven-month criminal investigation that concluded, predictably, that inexperience, not wrongdoing, was the culprit.
That is not to say Shapiro’s task force, which will include law enforcement agencies, civil defense officials and election administrators, should or will ignore instances of fraud or faulty election procedures.
But its priority must be building and maintaining trust in a system in which thousands of dedicated public servants and part-time poll workers perform the most essential task in our democracy, ensuring the fairness of our elections.
As part of that mission, the state has posted a fact-checking page at vote.pa.gov that addresses some of the more widely spread, and definitively debunked, conspiracy theories about elections. Anyone wishing to gauge the veracity of claims by election deniers should make that webpage their first stop.
Our election system has long been one of the best-run and most-trusted sectors of our self-government. Shapiro’s task force and all of us have a duty to ensure it is not further damaged by a deceitful few acting on their worst impulses.
— Scranton Times-Tribune via AP
