Pennsylvania election officials – in a bid to avoid controversy in November – are telling voters ahead of time not to expect the results of the high-stakes presidential race to be ready by Election Night.
The battleground state is of such significant importance this election cycle that Vice President Harris visited Pennsylvania on Aug. 18, ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and former President Trump made back-to-back visits both on Aug. 17, when he returned to Wilkes Barre for the first time since facing an assassination attempt in that town, and again on Aug. 19 in York.
To avoid repeated controversy from four years ago, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt – a Republican appointed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro in 2023 – is explaining to voters that state law prohibits county boards of elections from beginning to process mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.
"The terminology is normally called pre-canvasing," Schmidt, a former Philadelphia city commissioner who clashed with Trump online after the 2020 election, explained to Fox News Digital. "Plenty of other states allow the county boards to begin that process in advance of Election Day, whether it's three days or seven days or however long. But in Pennsylvania, counties can only begin that process at 7 a.m. on election morning."
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By contrast, states like Florida, with nearly double the population size of Pennsylvania’s approximately 13 million residents, report their preliminary election results on Election Night.
"It is bologna that Florida, which has more citizens, Texas, which has more citizens and more voters by millions, are able to have their elections counted all in one day. But Pennsylvania is not," Scott Pressler, a conservative activist leading a grassroots effort to get Republicans to register and vote early in Pennsylvania this election cycle, told Fox News Digital.
Pennsylvania is among seven states, including the fellow battleground of Wisconsin, where pre-canvassing is prohibited under state law.
It never posed a major issue until 2020, Dr. Dan Mallinson, a political science professor at Pennsylvania State University, explained to Fox News Digital.
Mail-in ballots used to be granted only under special circumstances, such as when a voter is sick or traveling around the time of the election. But in October 2019, former Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed what he championed as a "historic election reform bill" known as Act 77 into law, allowing most voters to apply for a mail-in ballot and vote by mail without needing to provide a reason or excuse.
The coronavirus pandemic saw a drastic surge in mail-in ballot use, and four years later, Mallinson said voting still looks similar in the Keystone State.
"There was a huge inflow of mail-in ballots in both the primary and the general in 2020," Mallinson said. "Mail-in balloting has kept up in the 2022 cycle. I mean, it doesn't look like it's going to really slow down."
More than 1.2 million Pennsylvanians voted by mail in the 2022 governor's election.
Shapiro’s administration announced in June that mail-in ballot applications would be available two months earlier than in 2020, allowing voters more than eight weeks of additional time to apply for their ballot.
For the commonwealth to begin processing mail-in ballots before 7 a.m. on Nov. 5, Schmidt said the state legislature would need to send pre-canvassing legislation to the governor's desk.
PRE-CANVASSING BILL ‘IMPASSE’
Schmidt said he has testified in front of the Pennsylvania state House and state Senate advocating for mail-in ballot pre-canvassing, and it is frequently added to election reform bills. Most recently, the Democratic-controlled state House passed an election reform bill that includes a pre-canvassing measure, but the bill so far has not been taken up by the state’s Republican-controlled Senate.
"We knew this was an issue in 2020. It was on display for anyone paying attention to election results in Pennsylvania in 2020 and puts Pennsylvania at a unique disadvantage," Schmidt told Fox News Digital. "It's a technical problem with a technical solution that does not benefit any candidate. It does not benefit any party. It just allows counties to begin processing mail-in ballot envelopes prior to Election Day."
"This is a fixable problem that we've just been unable to fix, you know, as a way to head off the rhetoric about, 'there's something shifty going on with these mail-in votes,'" Mallinson added. "The option is either the Republican-controlled Senate passes the clean bill and the governor signs it, or the Republican-controlled Senate does what has happened in the past, and they add things that they want to it, and then it probably gets rejected in the House. So we're still kind of stuck in this impasse…. These, sort of, poison pills that get added, have got attached to the bill in the past, and that's made it impossible to pass."
There was a brief period in September 2020 when it appeared the state legislature, controlled by Republicans in both chambers at the time, was going to be able to a pass a clean pre-canvassing bill before going out of session and lawmakers went home to campaign, but Mallinson said a measure to ban drop-boxes was tacked on, which the Democratic Wolf administration would not agree to, so the legislation failed.
"They were close in 2020 at a much later point than right now," Mallinson said. "There’s time, but I don’t know if there’s the political will or push."
A margin of tens of thousands of votes handed a win to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 in Pennsylvania. The Keystone State has 19 electoral votes, tied with Illinois for the fifth most.
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GOP STRATEGY SHIFT
Republicans, Mallinson noted, have shifted their strategy from emphasizing voter fraud concerns with mail-in ballots after the 2020 election to now encouraging their party to vote by mail.
Pressler, the founder of Early Vote Action, is leading those efforts in vying to get former President Trump elected in 2024.
Pressler told Fox News Digital he has been going county-to-county in Pennsylvania delivering letters asking board of election offices what officials are doing to ensure non-citizens are not registered to vote and that paper ballots do not run out on Nov. 5. Pike County officials have been responsive, he said, and Pressler wants to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2022 in Luzerne County, where they ran out of paper ballots during the midterm elections.
Since the 2020 election, the state has seen "significant turnover of election administrators," Schmidt said when asked if paper ballots were stocked this time around.
"In Pennsylvania, we've lost more than 80 senior election directors or administrators since 2020. We only have 67 counties," Schmidt told Fox News Digital. "But many counties, including Luzerne, have had the election director replaced election after election after election. That issue, with not having enough ballots ready in advance of Election Day, it was one that's obviously a great cause for concern."
"We work closely with our counties to make sure that they're prepared for Election Day," the secretary added. "We provide guidance to them. We provide directives to them to make sure that they have an ample supply of ballots, whether they're mail-in ballots or ballots cast at the polling place on Election Day, so that anyone can make their voice heard if they're a registered voter."
In Pennsylvania, every county has three commissioners, two are the majority party, one is the minority.
Schmidt was the only Republican of three Philadelphia city commissioners overseeing the 2020 election.
In June 2022, Schmidt testified before the Jan. 6 House Committee that he investigated and found no evidence of claims brought by Trump's former adviser Rudy Giuliani that more than 8,000 mail-in ballots were submitted on behalf of dead people in 2020 in Philadelphia. Schmidt also told the Democratic-controlled committee that death threats against him and his family worsened after Trump tweeted his name.
NON-CITIZEN VOTER CONCERNS
Pressler has implored Shapiro, who was briefly considered as Vice President Harris’ running mate, to enact an election integrity executive order to ensure non-citizens aren’t on Pennsylvania’s voter rolls.
In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin said his administration had uncovered more than 6,000 non-citizens on the state voter rolls since he took office.
In Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose last week announced that nearly 600 non-citizens were found to be registered to vote, including about 100 who actually voted. He, therefore, ordered an annual audit of the state voter rolls to scan for and remove anyone found to be unlawfully registered to vote.
Mallinson, meanwhile, said officials are wary of cleaning the rolls during an election year to avoid disenfranchising eligible voters.
Schmidt said that non-citizens on the voter rolls shouldn’t be a cause of concern in Pennsylvania, stressing that voter registration in the commonwealth requires a Social Security number.
Asked directly if he could guarantee there are no non-citizens currently on the voter rolls, Schmidt said it was "encouraging to see states like Virginia and Ohio catch up with Pennsylvania," crediting himself for bringing the issue of non-citizens registering to vote in Philadelphia to the attention of then-Pensylvania Secretary of State Pedro Cortés in 2016, and the "Motor Voter" program loophole was "resolved a few years ago."
"When you register to vote in Pennsylvania, you have to provide a Social Security number, and you have to prove or provide a driver's license number along with your name and the address where you reside," Schmidt said. "So, any vulnerability in the system that I've encountered as a Republican election commissioner in Philadelphia for ten years is not one where non-citizens would be able to register to vote, especially ones that are here in a sort of undocumented status."
The Shapiro administration in December canceled a $10.7 million contract to update the Pennsylvania voter roll system to avoid making the change during a presidential election year. The current system, known as the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE), is two decades old and described as outdated by election administrators who use it to check voter registration and track mail-in ballots.
More than a year ago, however, Schmidt said his department began providing new hardware and software upgrades to counties, insisting that the SURE system is reliable for getting through the presidential race.
"It's very dangerous to change an election system in a presidential election cycle with heavy turnout and all the rest," Schmidt said.
The state has an open request for bids out to build a replacement system, which Schmidt hopes will be "more user-friendly for our county partners."
He stressed that the SURE system is essentially "the database of all registered voters in Pennsylvania" and is "unrelated to voter tabulation."
"The Shapiro administration has taken many steps to prepare for this election – from setting up a training team to train new election directors to setting up an election threat task force in the event that we encounter any of the ugliness that we encountered in 2020 with threats of violence or intimidation targeting our election officials or our voters," Schmidt said. "It's important to be prepared for the coming election. It's a presidential election. Everyone is going into it with eyes wide open and, working closely with our county partners, I'm confident that we will have a free and fair and safe and secure election in Pennsylvania in 2024."
