How the top election official in America's biggest swing state is preparing for November

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s top state election official, outlined Thursday how administrators in the nation’s biggest battleground state are preparing to take on election misinformation and even potential violence before and after ballots are cast this year.

Schmidt, a Republican who in 2020 was a Philadelphia election official and was targeted by Donald Trump as the then-president peddled false accusations of fraud in the city, spoke to NBC News in between panels at an event focused on election safeguards. He pointed to the importance of proactively debunking incorrect information swirling online, which he says can inflame emotions during voting season and stir people to threats or acts of violence.

But he said election officials have learned a lot since 2020.

“I would say one contributing factor is the volume of misinformation that voters are being subjected to — just an avalanche of it,” Schmidt said. “And when it’s mis- and disinformation, it can lead, I’m sure, very sincere, well-intentioned people to act out based on that false information that they believe to be true.”

Schmidt, who was appointed Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, said he and other officials now look to “pre-bunk” false claims earlier to give them less time to metastasize with the public.

Without pointing to specific candidates, Schmidt said political rhetoric is often a main driver of misinformation that crops up around elections, along with “efforts to either prevent voting from taking place the way that it should, voters’ votes from being counted, certification from taking place and if you lost, to undermine confidence in the results.”

It’s not just “spontaneous,” Schmidt continued. “It’s a product, in my mind, of the sort of misinformation and disinformation we’ve seen suggesting that our election workers are engaging in fraud or some other underhanded thing to influence the outcome of the election one way or another.”

Debunked conspiracy theories regarding ballot-counting in Pennsylvania in the 2020 election were the source of several failed legal challenges by Trump and his allies, and some rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, cited them as evidence of fraud.

Election officials also faced threats and attacks from furious voters, with one local election official reporting that a third of the state’s 67 county election directors retired or resigned after the 2020 election.

To help combat some of the threats against election workers that emerged around the 2020 race, Pennsylvania has established a new election threats task force to monitor the situation.

In 2020, “there were threats of violence and intimidation targeting many of our election workers, not just in Pennsylvania, but in other places, and not just in big cities, it was rural counties as well,” Schmidt said.

But while he was pleased with progress on that front, Schmidt expressed dismay that Pennsylvania is the only battleground state that he said hasn’t made significant updates to its election laws since the 2020 race, attributing the lack of change to the divided state Legislature.

“It certainly is frustrating, because especially when it comes to how early counties can begin processing mail ballots, it’s a technical problem with a technical solution that doesn’t benefit any party, doesn’t benefit any candidate, but would benefit the voters and would benefit our country to know the results earlier,” Schmidt said. Pre-processing of mail ballots before Election Day — for example, verifying voter signatures and opening envelopes to prepare ballots for tabulation — can result in much faster vote counts.

After a drawn-out court battle, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that mail-in ballots without correctly written dates can be tossed out. Schmidt called the ruling disappointing, but he said officials have been consistently signaling the importance of dating ballots correctly to ensure votes are counted.

“Every vote is precious, and having run elections for 10 years, it is heartbreaking to stand there and not be able to count ballots because the voter forgot to date it, or they misdated it, and an elderly voter wrote their birthday instead of the day they completed that ballot envelope. So the decision is certainly a disappointing one,” Schmidt said.

Asked whether disruptions at the polls could re-emerge in urban areas like Philadelphia this cycle, Schmidt said things in 2020 didn’t take a turn until after Election Day, then the aftermath got “a lot more ugly.” This cycle, he said, the new task force will play a major role in combating any interruptions.

“You’ve got to prepare for it, right?” Schmidt said. “You don’t want to assume that the next election will be like the last, and that’s why I think the task force and all the rest is an important thing, working closely with county district attorneys so that if voters’ voting is being interfered with, they’re on the scene to make sure everybody knows what the law requires and to hold people accountable if they are preventing voters from casting their vote.”

With statewide mail-in voting set to begin soon, he says officials have done as much as they can to minimize disruptions.

“It’s really not about worrying,” Schmidt said. “It’s about preparing for any possible scenario we might encounter.”