The Pennsylvania Senate Advances the Nomination of a Republican Elections Watchdog as Secretary of the Commonwealth

Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt’s nomination to be Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth, an office which oversees elections, among other roles, has been approved by the Republican-led Senate State Government Committee. Schmidt, a Republican who oversaw elections as the City Commissioner of Philadelphia for a decade, was nominated by the new liberal Democratic Governor. The elections watchdog, who had issued a report against voter registration fraud in overwhelmingly Democratic Philadelphia, resisted the false claims of Donald Trump about the 2020 General Election, in which the Democratic presidential ticket earned more votes for their slate of Electors in the Keystone State than did Trump’s, despite criticism from Trumpist Republicans and death threats to him and his family. Schmidt later chaired Philadelphia’s Committee of Seventy, an organization that promotes free and fair elections in the City of Brotherly Love. The only vote against Schmidt came from Trumpist Republican Doug Mastriano, a conspiracy theorist who believed Trump’s lies about the 2020 General Election in Pennsylvania, which the Trump-Pence slate of Presidential Electors lost, and who baselessly questioned his own electoral trouncing in his campaign for Governor last year. Schmidt, like Republican election officials in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and other States, as well as Republican-appointed federal judges and members of Congress, all rejected Trump’s false claims to have won the 2020 elections. In his hearing before the GOP-led Committee, Schmidt expressed support for the Electronic Information Registration Center, a multi-state compact the Commonwealth belongs to cross-checks the voter rolls of member States to eliminate from the voter rolls those voters who have moved to other States and registered to vote there. Some Trumpists have criticized this essential tool for election integrity and a few States have withdrawn from the compact, despite its success against the type of voter fraud that Trumpists claim to oppose. The nomination for Secretary of the Commonwealth could advance further through the Senate for confirmation, but if the Senate does not act within 30 days, the nominee becomes constitutionally confirmed.