WASHINGTON — A Republican-led effort to boost confidence in battleground state elections recently launched in Pennsylvania, which became a hotbed of election denial in 2020 and where officials say new rules can help restore trust among skeptical GOP voters as Election Day approaches.
Former U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta and former Gov. Mark Schweiker are leading the Pennsylvania effort for RightCount, a nonprofit aiming to educate voters and defend election workers and officials in hopes of bolstering confidence in the Keystone State’s electoral process.
In interviews with the Post-Gazette, the former congressman and governor said they’ve been meeting with state and local officials and civic leaders to help inspire confidence and shine a light on safeguards they say make the election more secure than it was four years ago.
“There will be more eyes on the election and more ears on the ground, so people should not give up,” said Mr. Barletta, who expressed concern that some voters who distrust elections would simply stay home on Nov. 5. “To put it in a baseball perspective, you can’t hit a home run if you’re afraid to go to the plate.”
The messaging comes amid a separate Republican effort this year to rally voters around mail-in and absentee voting, which have long been maligned by former President Donald Trump. The Republican presidential nominee still sows doubt in elections by falsely claiming widespread fraud or irregularities cost him the White House in 2020, though local, state and federal officials say the election — which he lost to President Joe Biden by about 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania — was secure.
“I’m asking people to look forward, not backward,” said Mr. Barletta, who before joining RightCount was trying to get Republicans across the state to embrace mail ballots “whether we like them or not.”
Mr. Biden received 1.4 million more mail-in ballots than Trump in 2020. But the GOP hopes to reverse its fortunes this time around, with the party and its allies pledging earlier this year to raise at least $10 million in Pennsylvania to get out the vote, including through early voting and mail-in and absentee ballots.
RightCount’s push also comes after the launch of a bipartisan effort, the Democracy Defense Project, led by former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, and former U.S. Rep. Melissa Hart, a Republican.
That group has promoted the state’s voting infrastructure and pledged to defend “those who have sworn to uphold the rule of law and to be an active voice against any individual or organization that would look to undermine lawful election processes and outcomes.”
Mr. Barletta, who noted that he has been on both the winning and losing sides of statewide elections, cited “more safeguards in place to protect the integrity of the election” this year, including cameras on “all ballot boxes that will be monitored closely,” first-time voters needing to show an ID such as a driver’s license, and “rigorous training for election workers who will be working the polls.”
Mr. Schweiker, who said it was “fantasy” to think Pennsylvania’s elections were “fraught with fraud,” said there had been “meaningful progress” on two aspects of the 2020 election that troubled him.
First, it’s now against the law for an individual to deposit multiple ballots into depositories. Second, the count can be conducted more quickly this time around: All 67 counties’ election staff “can now begin to process ballots at 7 a.m. in the morning — that’s 13 hours that were not really available to them four years ago.”
“With that in mind, I encourage Pennsylvanians to see the system as much improved, and solid and not subject to vagaries,” he said.
Lawsuits around the state’s ballot processes remain in the courts with less than a month before Election Day.
But the former governor noted that he was previously a county commissioner and board of elections member, and came to know “intimately the nature of the operation, the dedication of the election office workers, and our reliance on very civic-minded neighbors who really hold the elections neighborhood by neighborhood.”
“With that kind of deep grounding, my outlook is that we’ve come a long way to ensure ballot security, accuracy and reliability on Election Day,” he said.
RightCount has held dozens of informational Zoom conferences and meetings with local and state leaders to get more Pennsylvanians to build confidence in the election, according to Mr. Schweiker. The group says it is also working to build confidence in elections in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.
The nonprofit worked with Washington-based market research firm Cygnal to find that more than 8 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more confident in the accuracy of the election after learning state officials must use multistate databases to check for duplicate voter registrations and that all paper ballots are required to be stored in locked facilities to prevent tampering, RightCount said; 80% are also more confident when they learn no voting equipment is ever connected to the internet.
“My father, my husband and I, and our children all served in the Navy,” said veteran Toni Chase, a member of RightCount’s leadership advisory council, which includes business leaders, attorneys and community leaders across the state. “Each one of us has voted absentee with confidence that our vote will be counted accurately, and our voice will be heard.”
First Published: September 24, 2024, 7:07 p.m.
Updated: September 25, 2024, 6:06 p.m.
