"We know that those threats are out there": Philadelphia officials brace for election shenanigans

The Republican who helps oversee elections in Philadelphia is prepared for a certain someone posting his name on Truth Social. Already the former president has pledged that people like him — “Corrupt Election Officials” who refuse to manufacture evidence of fraud for the GOP campaign — will be “sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

That’s if he wins. If he loses? Donald Trump has demonstrated that, where the state won’t act, his supporters will. In fact, City Commissioner Seth Bluestein already experienced it firsthand.

“In 2020, we had to have police protection outside of my house to protect my wife and kids while I was at the Convention Center counting ballots,” he recounted in an interview with Salon. This time, again: “We have preparations in place to ensure that, if we do receive threats, that my family will be safe.”

Last time around, Bluestein was working as a deputy to former City Commissioner Al Schmidt, the only Republican on Philadelphia’s Board of Elections, which by law is required to have one of its three members come from the non-majority party in a city where Democrats hold almost all the elected offices. Schmidt, now overseeing elections across Pennsylvania as secretary of the commonwealth, was singled out by the former president and blamed for this 2020 loss.

“A guy named Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Commissioner and so-called Republican (RINO), is being used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia,” posted on Nov. 11, 2020. “He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty.”

Schmidt was then inundated with death threats from Trump supporters. “The threats became much more specific, much more graphic,” Schmidt testified before the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss. Those threats “included not just me by name,” he noted, “but included members of my family, by name, ages, our address, pictures of our home — every bit of detail you can imagine.”

Bluestein, witnessing that ordeal and experiencing some of the blowback himself, decided to accept a promotion when Schmidt left.

“I did see it up close,” Bluestein said, but despite the threats he felt it was important “to have an experienced, bipartisan Board of Elections, especially in Philadelphia, which is the most populous county in the largest swing state in the country.” Counting votes, he said, “is not a Democratic value or a Republican value: It is an American value, and we need to do everything possible to do the job well.”

In 2024, however, counting votes is very much seen through the lens of partisanship. A super-majority of Republican voters claim to believe the leader of their party, who falsely insists that he won the 2020 election only for it to be stolen by an array of shifting villains: voting machines hacked by Italy or China or Venezuela, perhaps, or American election workers counting ballots by hand.

The only thing certain about the November election is that Trump will say he won, whatever the vote tally. There is no process so transparent and secure that it will prevent the Republican nominee from claiming there is widespread fraud — even when he won, in 2016, he claimed his popular vote loss was a product of immigrants voting illegally (a task force set up to prove this was disbanded by the former president himself with nothing to show for it).

What happened in 2020 will happen almost certainly happen again: Trump will claim any election-night lead in Pennsylvania should be the final tally — and that any ballots counted in the days to follow will be fraudulent and should be tossed out. He will do this knowing, then as four years ago, that election workers in Pennsylvania are legally barred from counting mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Nov. 5.

“The window in time from when the polls close until when the race can be called is the biggest window where disinformation could spread,” Bluestein noted. In the last presidential election, that window was four days, plenty of time for Trump to cry foul and incite what experts describe as “stochastic terrorism,” a term for the acts of intimidation and violence that follow his vilification of political opponents and even just public officials doing their jobs.

In 2020, 48 hours after the polls closed, a pair of out-of-state Trump supporters pulled up in a Hummer loaded with guns and ammunition outside the Convention Center, where other Trump supporters, answering their president’s call, were demanding that election workers simply stop counting other people’s votes. The men, believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory who each had a handgun on their person, were arrested before any violence transpired.

Republicans, who control the Pennsylvania Senate, saw this play out and chose to stand in silence as local members of their party, like Schmidt and Bluestein, were made targets of disinformation. They also blocked legislation, passed by the Democratic-controlled House, that would have prevented a repeat of 2020 by allowing officials to begin counting mail-in ballots up to a week before Election Day.

Counties, then, are doing what they can on their own to speed up the process. In Philadelphia, that means new ballot-counting machines that could cut in half the time it takes to tally the votes, at least if the city matches the pace of election workers in Pittsburgh and the rest of Allegheny County, Spotlight PA reported. The actual process of counting ballots has also been moved from the Convention Center, in the heart of Philadelphia, to a secure location in the northeast of the city.

“Combine that with the fact that there will be fewer people voting by mail and I am cautiously optimistic that we are in a good place right now,” Bluestein said, while declining to speculate on how long the count would take this time. There also does not seem to be as much enthusiasm for harassing election officials, at least in Philadelphia: “At this point in 2020, we were already receiving threats," he said. "That’s not the case right now.”

One concern is that the threat to election integrity won’t necessarily present itself until Election Day. In training sessions sponsored by the Republican National Committee, conspiracy theorists like Jack Posobiec have encouraged volunteer poll watchers — already primed to believe that Philadelphia and other “Democrat” cities are ground zero for fraud — to be far more aggressive than they have been in years past.

“You need to think of yourself as the ground forces, as the army that’s going to be out there,” Posobiec said at one recent session, per The New Yorker, “the eyes and the ears of the Trump campaign, of the Republican Party, that are there on the front line to say, ‘We are going to catch you, and when we catch you we’re going to make a stink about it.’”

In Pennsylvania, poll watchers must be registered to vote in the county where they wish to observe ballots being cast, their status certified by the local election office. Once approved, they are allowed supervised access to voter lists and are entitled to “make good faith challenges to an elector’s identity or continued residence in the election district,” according to guidance issued by the commonwealth.

Whether those challenges have any merit — or whether they are unlawfully based on a voter’s race, ethnicity or national origin — is assessed by a local Judge of Elections, who in turn is empowered to call the police on anyone disrupting the process.

Philadelphia officials say they are prepared to defend poll watchers’ right to observe the process at the same time as they defend others’ right to cast a ballot.

“Anyone who has the right to vote should be able to vote without interference,” Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Joshua Barnett said in an interview. Working under progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner, Barnett, head of the DA’s special investigations unit and chief of the office’s Election Task Force, told Salon that he and a team of prosecutors are prepared for a repeat of 2020.

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The last election, and in particular the efforts to intimidate those counting the votes, “was really the catalyst” for changing how the city approaches election security, Barnett said.

“No one ever expected the count to be the part where people might try to interfere. So now the counting is in a much more secure location. There’s a larger police involvement. We’re much more involved,” he said. “We’ve been in meetings with federal, local and state stakeholders like once or twice a month, if not more, and have done multiple tabletop exercises, which are essentially gaming out election day and the days after.”

“That’s the difference now,” Barnett added. “I’m aware of every little thing that happens at the commissioners’ office that could potentially evolve into some type of threat. If they get a weird letter; if someone’s been hanging around one of their locations and it seems sketchy or for whatever reason is making people feel uncomfortable — those are things they’re letting us know about,” he said. “It may not be criminally actionable, but it gives us a much larger view of everything and that way we can look and it say, ‘Hey, is this something that warrants further investigation?’”

Barnett said his office is also on the lookout for voter fraud. But he stressed that, despite the claims of a former president and his allies, it is exceedingly rare. In the past few years that he’s been working on election-related issues, Barnett said “the amount of people who have been flagged for even potentially having issues with their voting has been less than 10.”

Matthew Stiegler, senior counsel with the district attorney’s office, said he and other Philadelphia officials are “confident” heading into November that they can address “any attempt to threaten or intimidate voters or election officials.”

“We know that there could be attempts to interfere with certification, interfere with the process of counting votes, to try and get the courts to improperly intervene and to overturn the result of the election,” Stiegler told Salon. “We know that those threats are out there. But we're confident that voters are going to be able to cast their vote however they choose to cast their vote — and whoever they choose to cast their vote in support of, we're confident that those voters are going to be able to do that safely and securely.”