politics. >> middle and high school students, it is your time to shine. you're invited to participate in this year student camera documentary competition. picture yourself as a newly elected member of congress. we ask your senators what are your top priority and why. make a five to six minute video that shows the importance of your issues from opposing and supporting perspectives. be bold. amongst the 1000 dollars in cash prizes is a grand prize. videos must be submitted by january 20, 2023. visit our website at studentcam.org for researches -- for resources and a step-by-step guide.

>> a conversation on election security without schmidt. he served as a witness. explain what the committee for safe and secure elections is. guest: after the 2020 election and what administrators experienced across the country, it became clear that both from the election administration stamp white and from a law enforcement standpoint we needed to build a better relationship between those two communities. administrators, including myself, and others had it worse than i did, were on the receiving end of an avalanche of threats of violence and worse, targeting myself and my family and my little kids. before 2020, that had not been

as common of an occurrence as we saw that time. because those relationships had never really been built before. we began meeting informally and then formed the committee for safe and secure elections to try to build a partnership between the election administration community and the law enforcement community. host: for folks who do not know your background, when and where were you and election abatis traitor? guest: philadelphia has -- and election administrator? guest: i was the republican city commissioner from 2012 until 2022 and ran, it would have been about 2000 elections during that time. host: when and why were you targeted? guest: in my case, we began

receiving threats before election day. they were pretty generic in nature. corrupt election officials will get what is coming to them, you are what the second amendment is for, you are walking into the lion's den, general hateful things like that. a few days after election day after the former president targeted me by name in a tweet, that is when the threats became much more specific, much more graphic, named my children, provided my home address, pictures of my home, and obviously descriptions of what they were threatening to do to my children if i did not lie about the election. threats like that are intended to coerce and intimidate. it was important that i keep

doing my job, which was to count voters' votes and let law enforcement do their job, which is to protect my family, my colleague and everyone involved in counting the voters' votes. host: what does safe and secure mean for election 2022? guest: one thing that was really lacking was there was no relationship before on the side of election administrators who had never received threats like this before, not knowing what to do with them. there is a report that indicates about 1 in 6 election administrators received threats during that election and half of those did not report them. building this relationship and a cross partisan way will help us develop solutions to better

protect election workers should problems like this occur down the line. by election workers, i do not just mean someone like myself who is running elections. on election day, by far the most important people are your friends and neighbors working the election board at your local precinct in a church basement or a rec center or community center or something like that for a very long day to make sure your votes are counted. it is important we protect them and it is important they feel safe and they be safe. and when unfortunate events like threats occur, they know what to do in the right way to respond. host: from a story earlier this week, a picture of some preparations that are underway for the midterm elections. they write in flagstaf

arizona, a ection office will be barricaded by bulletproof glass and anyone wishing to enter will have to ring a buzzer. intel ss, florida, -- an office conducted active shooter training for its workers and has bullets and bomb resistant glass. in jefferson county, colorado, security guards will be positioned outside of the busiest polling centers. what does that picture tell you about the threat environment right now? guest: the threats are very real. i know philadelphia has taken steps to also help protect the vote counting center and other things like that from any sort of acts of violence. the delicate balance is making sure you are able to be safe and

secure when doing your job, but also to not prevent the transparency of the process. it is important that elections be not only safe and not only fair, but also transparent and done in a bipartisan way. you have to make sure you can protect election workers and counting votes, but at the same time not prevent transparency. when i say the threats are real, in our case in footnote yet, we had two their arranged individuals drive up from virginia with guns on them to go to the convention center to, in their words, prevent some sick tisha's truck load -- ficticious truckload of fake ballots. they were arrested outfront.

they were armed with guns from out of state in philadelphia. they were just found guilty of those charges earlier this week. it is important our federal, state and local law enforcement partners know how to react when threats arrive. when people move from just making threats, as bad as they are, to email, text messages or voicemail or whatever else, when that moves to an area where they are physically acting out as a result of believing whatever they believe from whatever sources they are getting it and crossing over a line to where they are physically taking action. host: do you want law enforcement or an armed guard at polling stations in 2022? guest: no. every jurisdiction in the

country has different laws that control the precincts and voting locations. in philadelphia, the philadelphia police are permitted to be at a polling place unless something occurs, there is a fistfight or the election board or voters call them in and say they are needed, that can otherwise not be there. i am confident in the presence of law enforcement. it is a matter of working with law enforcement before election day to make sure they be aware of the threat environment and to have a plan in place for what you do should it occur. that is the most important thing. the preparation should the sort of events occur, both on the election administrator side and align enforcement side. host: it is called the committee for safe and secure elections. al schmidt is our guest and with

us for the next 20-25 minutes. phone lines for you to call in. as usual, republicans, (202) 748-8001. democrats, (202) 748-8000. independents, (202) 748-8002. i want to start on the line for independents, barbara from oklahoma. good morning. caller: good morning. this thing about safe elections, i am 86 years old and the first time i ever remember an unsafe election was when chavez got in and was the first mexican to be elected into l.a. is a congresswoman. i do not remember who she was running against, anyway, the guy who lost wanted the ballots

recounted. they recounted and it came out that he did win, but california would not change it. chavez is still in office as far as i know, i live in oklahoma now. at one time, everyone in california -- i am from san jose -- i never had any trouble voting or watching anyone else vote but l.a. in the valley over different ballgame. it has been like this for years and i do not think it will be stopped. host: have you ever felt unsafe on election day? caller: oh, no. i like the way they do it in oklahoma. when you vote, your vote is counted right there and then. host: that is barbara in oklahoma. guest: i cannot really speak to that specific election in

california, although i think you have the name wrong of the candidate involved. i have no doubt there have been specific races or cases across the country in recent years and also going way back, where there have been individual instances of threats occurring on, before or after election day. in 2020, the experience was much different as this happened to election officials across the country. it happened to democratic officials and republican officials. it happened in big blue cities and rural counties. there is nothing partisan about the people on the receiving end of these threats or partisan about efforts to make sure the people who run elections are safe. host: aubrey in alabama, republican.

good morning, you are next. you are with us. go ahead and turn down your tv because it will make the conversation easier and go ahead with your question or comment. caller: ok. once we get donald trump out of the way and everything will get back to the way it is supposed to be. host: that is aubrey with this comment. this is tim in arkansas, an independent. good morning. what is your question or comment, tim? caller: hello. host: go ahead. caller: am i on? host: go ahead. caller: i hear your speaker talking, the gentleman from pennsylvania. [indiscernible] host: you are just breaking up a

little bit too much. guest: could i say something related to aubrey's comment? what we are experiencing is not entirely about one person. we have nearly 1/3 of americans who don't have trust in election results. as disturbing as that is, that number was pretty much the same right after the 2020 election. nearly two years on and we find ourselves in a similar place. there is an expression that it is a lot easier to fool someone than to convince someone they have been fooled. in the 2020 election, a lot of people were fooled into believing that election was rigged or corrupt or that it was close. it was not.

joe biden won pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes. it certainly was not close in our state. host: you testified in a june hearing for the january 6 committee. what were you asked about and what did you tell the committee on that day? guest: i was asked about allegations of voter fraud that we received and whether we had looked into them or not. the one allegation that was repeated by former mayor rudy giuliani and others were that 8000 dead voters voted in pennsylvania's election and i simply pointed out that when investigating cases like this, it is very easy to investigate whether a vote was cast for a deceased voter or not.

you have access to the date the voter passed away. in the voter registration database, you have access to see when dates were cast by certain voters. a dead voter voting is the easiest thing in the world to prove and i pointed out that not only did we not have evidence of 8000 of them -- repeated by prominent people -- we did not have evidence of 8 of them. some of that was related to that and some was related to what we are discussing today, the sort of threat environment and what can be done to help with that. i testified in front of the january 6 committee and the senate rules committee on threats to election workers. i know senator amy klobuchar, i am grateful she did this recently, she put forward a bill called the "election worker protection act," which is something being done at the federal level to protect election workers.

it is important that things like that are addressed. the election laws were written so long ago that they really do not take things like we are seeing now into account. it is illegal, in our case, for someone to show up at a polling place to try to disrupt voting. but there is nothing about showing up at the vote tabulation center to disrupt the counting of votes. the laws have to get up to date. host: you mentionedhelection workers protection act. we will puso information on the screen for the viewers. severa -- f training, retention and recruitment of poll workers, training resources to investigate teats to workers, grants to states, as we a several other pieces to that piece of legislation. what do you think is the most important part? guest: obviously, grants are

important because you cannot take some of these actions -- election administration is historically not well-funded for many people, including the people who appropriate our taxpayer dollars. people frequently do not pay that much attention to elections other than at election time and there is a lot of preparation that has to be done in advance. that is an important part. the other part, as i reference, is the need to have laws that are able to accommodate threats of violence and intimidation directed at the people who are making our democracy possible, people who are counting our voters' votes. there are plenty of good actors out there and plenty of bad actors. i want to be careful to not paint everyone who has questions about the election as abad-face

actor. many of them love america and care about election integrity as much as i do, but it is important that they go to trusted sources of information and that they do not allow themselves to be deceived and led down a road that leads to threats and, unfortunately in some cases, violence. host: talking about the threat environment right now. mark on twitter asks what violence has actually occurred at election offices or against election workers this cycle, this year? guest: in our case, in philadelphia, we know from the investigation that was presented in court that they had every intention of trying to breach

the philadelphia convention center. their communications show that. their efforts to go around and photograph the entranceways and all the rest, they had lockpick tools with them, it clearly indicates an intention to act on their misinformed beliefs for what was really going on. we are grateful that law enforcement was able to prevent that from occurring. host: joyce is in pennsylvania on the line for democrats. you are on with al schmidt. caller: hi. this is the first time i have ever gotten through and i cannot believe it. i just wanted to say that i know in the last election that there

was some kind of a supreme court ruling that happened because of the pandemic. they changed the rules in some way. i believe that our elections are free and safe. it is beyond my comprehension that people just do not believe that they were, and cannot believe that trump started this back in july, even before the election, that they would be stolen. even in 2016, if he would have lost, he would have done the same thing. i just wish people would trust

our government, our elections and move on, because it is really sad when it breaks up marriages, families, for something that is so trivial, in my estimation. guest: ma'am, i think what you are referring to in pennsylvania is probably referring to mail-in ballot voting. in pennsylvania prior to 2020, the only way to vote was to show up in person and vote on election day. or if you were absent from the county on election day or physically incapacitated in some way, you could cast an absentee ballot vote. in 2019, before covid was even

on the horizon, our republican house and our republican senate passed mail-in ballot voting, which was signed by our democratic governor. mail-in ballot voting was new in 2020, although it was unrelated to covid and its arrival. we had about half of our voters vote by mail in the 2020 election. one pennsylvania supreme court case but affected that was because of issues with the postal service presented to the supreme court, they ruled that boards of elections should count mail-in ballots received up to three days after election day. mail-in ballots are due back, by law, by in :00 p.m. on election evening. the pennsylvania supreme court ruled there were three extra days were ballots could arrive, provided they were not postmarked after election day,

and that those ballots should be counted. there was subject of much litigation. the number of ballots in question were not significant at all. pennsylvania was decided by more than 80,000 votes. at the end of the day, it did not have an impact one way or another but it was a specific court case related to the covid environment in 2020. host: virginia, this is ray, a republican, good morning. caller: good morning. am i on? host: you are on with al schmidt. caller: al seems like a very honest fella. i can tell you my outlook on the 2020 election. i think i can explain why so many people got upset. i really got upset, but i have a brain and i was not going to --