Swing State Election Officials Talk Election Security During Ash Center Webinar

Four election officials from the battleground states of North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania discussed how to maintain the security and fairness of their states’ elections in advance of the 2024 U.S. presidential election during a Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation webinar Tuesday afternoon.

The webinar — moderated by Ash Center Director Archon Fung — featured Adrian Fontes, secretary of state of Arizona; Al Schmidt, secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; Jocelyn Benson, secretary of state of Michigan, and Karen Brinson-Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

The event comes on the heels of mounting election security concerns as former President Donald Trump — who filed more than 60 lawsuits in an attempt to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election — campaigns to return to the White House.

During the talk, the officials said that making the election process more visible and open to public scrutiny was a key priority ahead of November in order to curb misinformation about election security.

Fontes said Arizona needs “radical transparency” to restore public trust in the electoral process, adding that the state has already implemented live-stream vote tabulation processes at and now allows ballot counting to be publicly observed at several centers, including in Phoenix and Flagstaff.

“Sunshine is the best disinfectant,” Fontes said.

Brinson-Bell added that in North Carolina, she has been focusing on building voter confidence through a website and social media posts that detail how elections function.

“We have done extraordinary measures with our website, with social media, with press availability to try to tell our stories and make sure that not just live video feed, but other avenues are there for people to understand how elections work,” she said.

The officials acknowledged that this election cycle would continue to be politically charged and could be inflamed by misinformation on social media.

“What keeps most of us up at night, I believe in this moment, is the potential for violence on election day,” Benson said. “And our hope that that doesn’t occur in our preparation to ensure in the rare instance that it does, that we will be there to mitigate and frankly also seek consequences for those who would disrupt our election.”

Schmidt acknowledged the surge of legal challenges to vote certification in his state during the last election cycle, but said they gave him and his office experience in how to navigate such legal battles should they arise in 2024.

“Unfortunately, two years ago we had three counties in Pennsylvania refuse to certify,” Schimdt said. “Fortunately, that gives you a little bit of experience in how to deal with these sort of situations.”

Schmidt added that in 2020, Pennsylvania took counties to court to order them to “fulfill their ministerial responsibilities as explicitly described in the law to certify the election results” — a legal measure he said the state would not hesitate to adopt again in 2024.

“We won’t be taking days or weeks to approach the courts for a court order,” Schimdt said. “It’ll be 12:01 AM the next morning if they fail to fulfill their statutory obligations under the law.”

Fontes was more optimistic about the likelihood of legal challenges to vote-counting, saying that while he recognized the presence of election deniers in Arizona, he thought their influence was “waning.”

“When you ask the entire state of Arizona what they think, they think you shouldn’t be denying elections — not just because it is a corruption or a corrosion of the civic faith that we should have in one another as Americans, but also, because it’s bad for business,” Fontes said.

Fontes added that the state’s decision to indict county supervisors who opted against certifying the election in 2022 has created a lasting “threat of criminal prosecution” that he anticipates will curb election challenges this year.

The officials said that accuracy was a top priority and that though official vote certifications would take time to be finalized, they were committed to ensuring the security of the 2024 elections.

“The key for any election official is to be as accurate as we can be, and that's the goal when we're reporting the unofficial results and the official results,” Brinson-Bell said.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.