DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Our next guest, Al Schmidt, had a memorable experience in the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump has long claimed was stolen. Back then, Schmidt was the lone Republican on the three-member election board of Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. Schmidt helped supervise and publicly defended the integrity of the long and tedious count of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots. The count took days and eventually gave Democrat Joe Biden the state's 20 electoral votes. But it earned Schmidt nationally reported insults from then-President Trump and threats from some of his followers.

Today Schmidt is secretary of the commonwealth, the chief voting official for all of Pennsylvania, which will again be a critically contested state in a national election with high stakes for Donald Trump. There are four competitive congressional races in Pennsylvania, which could help decide control of the House of Representatives. We thought it would be useful to get Schmidt's take on this election season and what he expects and fears from the voting on November 3 and the count and certification to follow.

Before we begin, I should note that Al Schmidt and I have known each other for a long time. I was a political reporter for many years for the Philadelphia Daily News and public radio when Al was active in local Republican politics.

Al Schmidt, welcome to FRESH AIR.

AL SCHMIDT: Great to be back with you, Dave.

DAVIES: Let's spend a moment on that harrowing experience following the 2020 election. And to remind listeners, this was the first COVID election - right? - 2020, when mail ballots, normally not common in the United States, were all over the country. Back then, Philadelphia was typically used to processing about 13,000, 14,000...

SCHMIDT: That's right.

DAVIES: ...Absentee ballots. Now there were over 370,000 mail ballots. And the state election code prevented your election workers from even opening the envelopes until Election Day, which meant it was going to take a long time. It was expected that Donald Trump would be ahead on the machine vote because he had discouraged people from using mail ballots. Tell us what it was like to try and get all those ballots counted as quickly as you could.

SCHMIDT: Yes. And to help sort of set the scene here, you're right. It was the first election that Pennsylvania had with no-excuse mail-ballot voting, meaning any voter could vote by mail. Philadelphia also had essentially new voting systems in-person at the polls that election. We also had the COVID environment possibly at its peak, and we also had civil unrest in Philadelphia. So we were trying to manage our way through all of those different challenges.

With mail-ballot voting, we had about half of our voters, probably because of the COVID environment at the time, vote by mail. That's a lot in a presidential election with predictably very high turnout. But one thing that puts Pennsylvania at a disadvantage then and now is that our counties can't begin processing mail ballots until 7 a.m. on election morning. Other states begin that process days, if not weeks, in advance.

DAVIES: They can rip open the envelopes so that you're ready to process the ballots, right?

SCHMIDT: That's right. So on election night at 8 p.m., they're ready to report the results of what they had worked on for many days, if not weeks. In Pennsylvania, that's not the case. So in 2020, obviously, we had the in-person results coming in first - those are people who voted at the polls on Election Day - followed by these waves of updates for voting by mail as they were tabulated by our counties.

DAVIES: Right. So you would give regular updates on what the count of the mail ballot showed. And what was happening was you could see that Donald Trump's lead in the state was shrinking as more Democratic votes rather than Republican were reflected in the mail ballots. It got to a point where it got ugly and personal, didn't it? I mean, threats, right?

SCHMIDT: Yes. So we had had fairly general threats prior to that, like, you're going to get what's coming to you, or things that, you know, don't really rise to a level of concern for me, especially at this point. But as it went on, they certainly got a lot more specific, naming my children, providing my address in the threats, obviously graphic descriptions of the violence.

So I really relied on law enforcement - especially the Philadelphia Police Department, which did an incredible job and I'm always going to be grateful - for really taking care of my family. Like, we were inside the convention center. We had many, many police officers and sheriffs present outside. That's probably why threats were targeting your family, right? You're not there. It's all about trying to keep you from doing your job. So we couldn't allow ourselves to be distracted from doing our job because of the threats targeting our families.

DAVIES: Was your family relocated?

SCHMIDT: My family was relocated. And then we had around-the-clock police protection for many months after that because the threats continued, certainly leading up to the certification of the presidential election many weeks later. So when I walked the dog, police were coming with us. When we took the kids sledding, the police were there. It was just a constant presence.

DAVIES: Yeah. Yeah.

SCHMIDT: Thanksgiving, Christmas.

DAVIES: I don't...

SCHMIDT: And so...

DAVIES: ...Want to be - yeah.

SCHMIDT: ...Sort of surreal. I don't mean to laugh about it, but it was a surreal environment. And we got to, you know, know them pretty well. And I - like I said, I'm grateful.

DAVIES: So you're still a registered Republican. And...

SCHMIDT: I am.

DAVIES: You're serving a Democratic governor in a swing state. So here we are. And President Trump has been very, very active in warning that there will be fraud and that mail ballots are subject to fraud. And not just talking. I mean, he's tried to do things and get the government to do things which would affect the voting in this election. Give us a sense of the kind of incoming demands you have gotten from the federal government.

SCHMIDT: Well, there have been several, primarily from the Department of Justice and from the Department of Homeland Security. The biggest, of course, was a demand that we provide Pennsylvania's voter rolls to DOJ. And not just the publicly available voter rolls but the Social Security numbers of every registered voter in Pennsylvania that we have, every driver's license number and all the rest. So that's information that we are, obviously, typically prohibited from sharing. It would not be legal for us to share. And it was clear that we weren't going to provide that information, and we declined their demand.

That information has to be safeguarded. Nothing would jeopardize election integrity more than Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers being shared with multiple government agencies with unclear control over that sort of information. So we declined. The courts ruled in our favor, as they did in more than two dozen others at this point in these lawsuits against DOJ.

DAVIES: Right. I believe also, the Department of Justice told you that there were 14,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania. Do I have this right?

SCHMIDT: Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security. The accusation was that we have north of 14,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania because of whatever data matching, using whatever datasets in whatever way that led them to reach that conclusion.

DAVIES: This came your way when? Like, two months ago? Or...

SCHMIDT: Some months ago.

DAVIES: OK.

SCHMIDT: And then we responded - rightly, I think - asking for more information on this. Like, what data was used? From what datasets? How did the matching occur? What do you consider a match and not a match? Like, I have the same name as my dad. Would we show up as a match, as the same person? Because they obviously did not have Social Security number or driver's license number, which is a unique identifier that everybody has, that would be necessary to do that sort of matching. And even when that matches, you still have to do the hard work. You still have to do the research.

And I was a Republican election commissioner in Philadelphia for 10 years. Election integrity is very important, from my point of view. And it's important to handle it responsibly and not just cry wolf every time you have some sort of data match based on garbage information.

DAVIES: And so you responded, saying, give us more information. And then what happened?

SCHMIDT: We had a virtual meeting with them where we asked more questions. The answers to those questions obviously were insufficient to provide us with any sense of security or certainty related to the reliability of their data. And that was the end of it, other than a letter from the Department of Justice saying, as you currently know, you are under criminal investigation.

DAVIES: Criminal investigation?

SCHMIDT: Yes.

DAVIES: When you're under criminal investigation, you generally know that by other means, like you get a grand jury subpoena or investigators come to you to talk to you? That...

SCHMIDT: You would. And it also doesn't usually start - as you must know, or as you know. But there's nothing certainly special about that. Every secretary who refused DOJ's demand received the same letter.

DAVIES: We'll take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Al Schmidt. He is Pennsylvania's secretary of the commonwealth, the state's chief election official. We'll talk more after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROBBEN FORD & BILL EVANS' "PIXIES")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And as we anticipate potential controversies involving the midterm election in two weeks, we're speaking with election integrity experts and an official involved in supervising elections. Our guest in this segment is Al Schmidt. He is Pennsylvania's secretary of the Commonwealth, the state's chief election official. Pennsylvania, a perennial battleground state, has four competitive congressional elections this year.

As you look forward to the election, just a little less than two weeks away, what worries you?

SCHMIDT: Well, anyone involved with an election administration worries about everything all the time. And any issue, big or small, can be exploited to undermine confidence in election results. So that's always a concern. It's never a question of things not being a concern. But obviously, now we've had to consider a lot more things than we did in the past, such as the threat of federal interference or anything like that. So we work with our counties. We do tabletop exercises with them. We work with our state partners - Pennsylvania State Police and National Guard and others - to work through different scenarios so that, should anything occur from any direction, we're all prepared and can communicate and know what everybody's roles and responsibilities are.

DAVIES: There's a lot of discussion about how common or uncommon election fraud is in the country. And you're in a better position than most people to have an opinion about this because you participated in elections not just as an election official, but as a Republican candidate running for office in a city run by Democrats. You also, when you were a city commissioner on the election board in Philadelphia, did a study of election improprieties and fraud. So what did you find? I mean, is there fraud out there?

SCHMIDT: Well, we did find evidence of cases of voter fraud, as we always have in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. It's just that it occurs extremely infrequently and has never had any impact on the outcome of an election. But that's not to shrug it off. And I made several referrals to the U.S. attorney's office and to the district attorney's office and attorney general's office and worked with all three levels of law enforcement in Pennsylvania and in Philadelphia to investigate and, when warranted, prosecute and hold people accountable who did commit acts of voter fraud. And it was always at a very local level, affecting very small races because that's where a handful of votes can really impact the outcome of an election, not necessarily President the United States or any statewide race.

DAVIES: One of the things you hear about corruption in Philadelphia is that dead people vote. You actually looked into this once, right? Tell us that story.

SCHMIDT: I did at great length. It is the easiest thing in the world to prove if it occurred. You know when a vote was cast, and you know when a voter died. You have a record of when the person died, and you have a record of when their vote was cast. So we worked comparing the Social Security Death Index against the voter rolls and narrowed it down to, in the end, it was about 10 to 12 cases that I was sure that we got. I was sure that we had identified 10 to 12 cases where a dead voter had voted. But you can't just rely on a data match and say that's evidence of anything. It was only a lead. So that's where you had to do the hard work. You had to knock on doors.

The first door I knocked on in North Philly, I remember the woman answered the door, and her record was that she was deceased. It's just that she had the same name as someone else in the same precinct or division in Philadelphia, and her record was canceled, not the person with the same name. So it showed up as a false positive. There was that, there was where people would go to vote, and someone else in the same place, usually mother and daughter or father and son, with the same name, and they would sign in the other person's spot, not in their spot. So it was never a question of more votes being cast...

DAVIES: The voter roll book that the election worker would say, sign here.

SCHMIDT: That's right. So it would be Al Schmidt followed by Al Schmidt, and they would sign where it had the one person, not the other. It wasn't a fraudulent vote or anything else like that. It was signing the poll book under the wrong person's name with the same name. And in the end, we ended up with zero out of that 10 to 12. It was kind of disappointing 'cause I thought for sure that, you know, you heard so much about all this over all these years, and you put in all that hard work. And, I mean, it was a relief knowing that you didn't have voter fraud going on. There was certainly something important to take from it all. But, you know, you end up in this search, and in the end, everything that could be done was done, and there was no evidence of it.

DAVIES: I'm wondering if the experience of 2020 has affected people's willingness to serve on election boards and assist in elections.

SCHMIDT: We track it at Department of State, and we've certainly seen an increase in turnover when it comes to the people responsible for elections, and there are many reasons for it, right? Sometimes people are just ready to retire. For others, it's because of the environment, the way that it's been around elections and also the requirements to be an election director have changed so much since I got involved in 2011 and 2012. So you have to be a lot more public facing. You have to be better at communicating. We have never had so much interest in elections. People have a lot of questions. It's just incumbent upon us to provide them with truthful answers to their questions so that they're not deceived by people who lie for a living.

DAVIES: Al Schmidt, I wish you a smooth and peaceful Election Day. Thank you for coming in and speaking with us.

SCHMIDT: Thank you, Dave.

DAVIES: Al Schmidt is Pennsylvania's Secretary of the Commonwealth, the state's chief election official.

(SOUNDBITE OF PSYCHOGRASS' "HIGH HAM")

DAVIES: On Tomorrow's show - actor Betty Gilpin, if you watched the series "Widow's Bay," you saw her Emmy-winning performance as a woman in the 1700s who realizes her new husband may be at the center of a Satanic curse. She now stars with Ethan Hawke in the new season of the FX show "The Lowdown." She also starred as Mary Todd Lincoln in the Broadway play "Oh, Mary!" I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director at engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.

(SOUNDBITE OF PSYCHOGRASS' "HIGH HAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.