Pennsylvania's loss of county election officials raises concerns about errors

A post-election evaluation by the Senate State Government Committee was amiable between Republican senators and the secretary of the commonwealth with mutual concern over human error, but some divides remain.

“This is sort of a wellness check on the electoral process,” said Sen. Cris Dush, R-Brookville, the chairman of the committee.

The department has focused on reducing human errors, hiring a chief training officer with a three-person staff to offer training to county election administrators, Secretary Al Schmidt said, as well as redesigning ballot envelopes to standardize them and make voter error less likely, such as failing to sign and date the ballot envelope.

The department is “an incredibly capable and dedicated group of people,” Schmidt said. “It is a relatively small team; I think we have fewer than two dozen people working on elections at the Department of State … in Philadelphia I had, I think, 125 people working full-time on elections.”

As those numbers show, the electoral process happens at the county, not state, level, leaving room for problems to bubble up. And the commonwealth is taking a hit in losing experienced county officials.

“There’s been significant turnover in election administrators,” Schmidt said. “Pennsylvania since 2020 has lost about 20 senior administrators at the county level … Whenever you have that significant turnover and you lose that kind of experience, you are more likely to encounter mistakes.”

Those mistakes can be trickier to deal with because they’re unintentional. Sen. Pat Stefano, R-Connellsville, brought up such an example when he asked about ballot errors in southwest Pennsylvania that should’ve been caught – but were not – in the proofing process.

“They are just human errors, but it sends a ripple through our faith in the system,” Stefano said.

Dush’s focus was on faith in the voting system more broadly.

“No one should oppose enhancing election integrity,” Dush said. “Pennsylvania deserves rules that guarantee it’s hard to cheat and easy to vote – but I think ‘hard to cheat’ comes first.”

“Most of the problems we’re encountering are derived from the significant turnover in election administrators at the county level,” Schmidt said. “It’s one reason why we’re emphasizing this resource by providing training for counties.”

Giving counties checklists and instructions so each one knows what needs to be done, he said, matters.

“Those sorts of mistakes, human errors easily made by nonexperienced election administrators, is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing commonwealth-wide,” Schmidt said.

Overall, though, the secretary argued that 2023 went “pretty smoothly.”

Schmidt noted how last-minute court decisions on election questions can cause problems and confusion, as well as “uneven delivery times” for the post office to deliver ballots. During one election, the secretary noted that his ballot took 11 days to arrive in the mail, but two days in the next election.

“Late arrivals are a challenge,” he said.

Schmidt and Dush parted ways regarding the audit process. The secretary explained the mock election run by the department prior to the election, along with a post-election 2% audit and risk-limiting audit, while Dush reiterated his desire for verifying every voting machine, comparing the process to verifying every gas pump and slot machine in the commonwealth.

“I understand the need for modernization in the vote counting; I’m also concerned about the many failures we’ve seen along the way,” Dush said. “Small failures lead to bigger ones … I think paper ballots are much more accurate and much more accountable than something that’s in the ether with electrons.”