All right, walking up to City Hall here.
Last week, I went on a short walk to drop off my mail-in ballot. Boxes here. I can't stress enough how easy this was. Walked right up to the Dropbox, checked my envelope, and that was that.
And then it goes.
I am one of more than 43 million Americans who have voted early by mail or in person so The vast majority of ballots have been cast without incident. However, there have been some efforts to interfere in the electoral process. For example, authorities in the Portland, Oregon, area are investigating after at least two of those ballot drop boxes were set on fire early Monday morning. They say the two incidents are connected to another Dropbox fire in Vancouver, Washington earlier this month. Hundreds of ballots were destroyed, but official stress all votes will be counted. And then there's foreign interference, with Iran and Russia being linked to alleged hacking and disinformation campaigns, respectively. And all of this is happening before any votes have even been counted wanted. So what's going to happen then? Today, an election official from a critical battleground state tells us what's keeping him up at night as election day approaches. From CNN, This is One Thing. I'm David Reind. For both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is perhaps the most crucial piece of their Electoral College puzzle. It could be that so-called Tipping Point State that seals the deal.
I'm looking at this crowd. It's such a young crowd. It's a young crowd. Got a lot of young people here.
Which is why we saw Trump show up on the campus of Penn State over the weekend, trying to rally young voters.
Well, it is good to be back in Philadelphia.
And it's why we saw Harris race across Philadelphia on Sunday.
She visited a predominantly Black church, barbershop, bookstore, and a Puerto Rican restaurant.
I'm very excited about the reports that we're getting about enthusiasm here in Philadelphia. And to your point, Philadelphia is a very important part of our path to victory.
Remember, President Joe Biden's dominance in Philadelphia helped tip the state in Democrats' favor in 2020. Trump wants to eat into that margin this time around. But counting the vote is not a straightforward thing. Republicans say they are already involved in 130 pre-election court cases across the country, setting the stage to cast doubt on the 2024 results. And officials in that crucial city of Philadelphia have been here before.
I served as the Deputy Commissioner for then City Commissioner Al Schmidt, who is now the Secretary of the Commonwealth. I served in that position for 10 years, so I had a lot of experience managing elections generally, and that was my third presidential election. But that week in 2020 was unlike anything we had ever experienced before.
Seth Bluestein is the City Commissioner of Philadelphia and the Secretary on the City's Bipartisan Board of Elections.
He says the sheer amount of mail-in ballots, remember, because of COVID, the state instituted no excuse absentee voting for the first time made counting the 2020 vote extremely tricky. He spoke to me from his office on Monday.
We don't have pre-canvassing prior to election day, so we were not able to start the counting process until 07:00 on election day itself when the polls opened. We had over 375,000 ballots to go through. We had hundreds of temporary employees, lots of equipment, and we got everything started as quickly as we could. Then we just had to keep going 24/7 until we were finished.
What were you hearing from outside voices? I'm thinking especially of Trump supporters who were talking about issues that they thought they had heard, like what messages were coming in as you were trying to do this work.
Well, the first thing that we experienced was complaints about their allegedly not being Republican observers at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Where we were counting the votes.
Today, there was a big problem. In Philadelphia, they went in to watch. They were called poll watchers. A very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out. They weren't allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia. Bad things.
And that was obviously not true because I was there interacting directly with observers from both parties. So that was the first real issue that we had to deal with on election day. And then from there, as the polls closed and the night kit went on, it just got more intense as time went on.
When you say intense, what does that mean?
Well, protesters started gathering outside of the Convention Center. There were complaints about ballots being counted because they didn't have any understanding of the fact that it would take longer for results to come in for the mail ballots because of how long it takes to count them and that we couldn't start until election day. It appeared like President Trump was winning because the in-person results were coming in. But then once the mail ballots finally got into the count, Biden caught up.
This is like that red mirage they talk about.
Yeah, the red mirage where it It appeared like the Republican was winning, but ultimately, that's just because not all the votes have been counted yet. As that continued, and then eventually, a couple of days later, when Biden overtook Trump in the totals in Pennsylvania, It really became a very challenging environment.
There is a gentleman there by the name of Seth Bluestein, who is an assistant to a city commissioner, and he is wearing a badge the size of a baseball. And as far as I know, he's not a sworn law enforcement officer. So it looks like intimidation to me.
My name was mentioned by someone from the Trump campaign at a press conference because I was the Deputy Commissioner interacting with the observers.
He told them they can't come any closer. He said the reason was because they can't interfere with the process. And then something about COVID, well, we all know at the polls.
And immediately following my name being mentioned, I started receiving anti-Semitic harassment and threats.
I mean, how did that make you feel just trying to count the votes, make sure everything is going according to the letter of the law, and you're getting these messages directed at you personally?
At the Convention Center, it was an interesting environment because when you're on the ballot counting floor, it's almost like a casino effect. You don't know what's going on in the outside while you're counting the votes. You don't know if it's night or day, if it's raining, you can't even hear the protesters. Even though the threats were starting to come in, I felt very secure on the ballot counting floor, counting votes. The bigger concern for me was that one of the threats mentioned coming to my house, where where my wife and kids were. We had to get police protection outside of my house to protect them. That's really the thing that got to me the most.
Did you ever expect anything like that would ever happen, getting into this line of work?
No. The eight years prior to that, I started in 2012, and it had not been like that at all. I remember when we first started, one of the commissioners who had been there for years prior, he was like, Well, especially during the summer, this is going to be a pretty boring job. Make sure you have some books to read. And that didn't turn out to be the case. Running elections is always a lot of work, and there's a lot of different ways you can improve election management. You're always trying to find ways to better the system. But, yeah, no, 2020 was so different than anything before.
There's a difference, though, between being not boring and being actually scary and having to get protection for your family?
That's exactly right. Yeah.
Why did you decide to come back and do the job again here in 2024?
It's a good question. When Secretary Schmidt left office, we had to fill the remainder of his term. When I was being interviewed for the appointment, that was the first question I was asked, which is, why do you want to keep doing this after what you just experienced? The answer is simply, because it has to be done. This is a bipartisan board of elections. It is important that we have an experienced bipartisan commissioner team running the elections in Philadelphia and knowing what we went through in 2020 and what was potentially going to happen in 2024, I didn't want to leave that in someone else's hands.
Well, so tell me about this election here, which is just about a week away. What preparations have you and your team done to make sure everything goes smoothly?
From an elections operation standpoint, things are looking really good right now. We have poll workers recruited, polling places are lined up, ballots have been mailed out to voters who requested them, they're coming back in, the voting machines have been programmed. So we're ready to go. When 2020 finished, we moved all of our equipment into a new permanent warehouse in a more remote part of the city. We've spent the last three and a half years preparing the security around that facility. That is also ready to go for this election.
What security around the building are we talking about?
Well, I'm not going to get into too much detail about what we have on the inside, but the obvious visible stuff We have fencing around the entire facility. We have guard shacks. You'll notice that the distance from where the fencing is to the building itself is much larger than the distance was at the convention center.
The protester's can't be knocking on the windows or anything like that?
No, they won't even get close.
Can you explain how the poll watchers will work this time around?
Well, poll watchers are at the polling places on election day. Sure. They are assigned by candidates or the parties. They get certificates to be able to go to polling places around the city and check on how the election day voting is going. The canvas observers at the warehouse also have to get credentials by a party or candidate. They go through security to get into the building, and then they'll be on the ballot counting floor, able to observe everything's happening.
So they will see every envelope opened and they'll be able to see it up close.
Yeah, the distance is much closer than it was at the convention center.
What about misinformation online? Because I've seen you be very active on Twitter/X actually responding to various claims, debunking them. You even quote-tweeted Elon Musk himself. But say there are rumblings about an issue at one of your polling stations or at this warehouse where the votes are actually being opened. Are there processes in place for your team to beat back some of this stuff in real-time?
Yeah, we have a whole team of communications professionals who will be at the warehouse monitoring social media and being ready to respond. I will personally respond to anything I see on social media that is incorrect. I don't care if you 200 million followers or two followers. It doesn't matter if you're supporting the Republican candidate or a Democratic candidate. Ultimately, the truth matters, and getting the truth out there to the best of our ability is important. And if something happens at a polling place that we need to correct in real-time, I'll drive down there and disprove any conspiracy theories myself. I did that in the 2022 midterm elections where there was misinformation about a polling place in South Philadelphia. I drove from the warehouse. It took me 40 minutes to get down there. And by the time I got down there, I was able to correct the misinformation right away.
Because obviously, there are some issues at polling places, like you mentioned, that may be actual things that you need to look at, but then there's the the fake stuff that is actually causing harm. Do you think any of this fact-checking that you're doing online, does it make a difference, or is there just too much of it to actually stem the of the people who firmly believe dating back even four years that it was stolen from Donald Trump and it's about to be stolen again.
We're not going to convince every single person who sees the post from Elon Musk that what he shared was incorrect. But it is still important to do fact-checking and to get the correct information out there. It is important to do it immediately, especially before the election, because if there are conspiracies about the election after the fact on those same issues, we can point back to our response in real-time as part of the evidence for why the election was being run correctly and fairly.
So you're setting a paper trail.
Yeah, and that's why it's so important to respond immediately as soon as we see something.
Talk to me about the vote counting itself. Pennsylvania is obviously a critical state that everybody will be watching as the night progresses, as the week progresses. Can you just break down which ballots will be counted when?
Sure. Starting at 07:00 AM on election day, we begin processing the mail ballots. We have significantly fewer mail ballots this election than we had in 2020, but it still takes a lot of time because you have to remove the secretcy envelope from the outer envelope and then remove the ballot from the secretcy envelope. After you reviewed everything and you approved them to get counted. You're talking about handling 600, 700,000 pieces of paper. The majority of those ballots that we worked on all day will be in the first batch of results released at 08:01 PM. Those will be mail ballots. Then throughout the evening, the results will come in from the polling places. We'll have the voting machine results from all the different precincts. That'll come in throughout the evening, probably between 9:00 PM and 1:00 AM. At some point before that, we will have a second release of mail ballot results results. Then from there, we will just continue counting the mail ballots until we finish.
You do expect it to go faster than it did in 2020, is that right?
Absolutely.
You're the sole Republican on the Philadelphia Board of Elections, is that right?
That is correct.
The Republican nominee, former President Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have not flat out said that they will accept the results no matter what. They offer this caveat of if it's fair and that stuff. As someone who works hard to get out accurate and clear information about voting and debunking all these claims like we talked about, do you want to see Trump win the White House?
I do not take a position on who should win elections. My job is to run the election fairly. What I can say is Pennsylvania's elections and Philadelphia's elections will be safe and secure. It will be free and fair. I expect every single candidate who is running to acknowledge that and say upfront that they will accept the results of the election.
But I guess as a Republican, how do you feel when the standard bearer, the party, continues spreading all this misinformation, not to mention just making your life harder by having to educate about all this.
It's unacceptable.
Well, I guess, finally, as an election official in a key battleground state, what's the one thing that keeps you up at night as we sit here on Monday, eight days from election day?
The window in time from when the polls close until when the race is called is the greatest window for miss and disinformation, which is going to lead to harassment and threats. We are doing everything in our power to speed up the vote counting process. But that window of time is still my biggest concern because there will be a potential time, whether it's Tuesday evening or early Wednesday morning, where the results may not be called in Pennsylvania. We don't control that. But That is when the biggest risk really is after the election.
Those people who are working in the warehouse, do they have concerns about coming in in that window, like actually getting into work and being able to do their job safely if there is harassment and disinformation floating around?
Everyone who has signed up to do this work is doing it because they are committed to counting people's votes in our democratic system. These are people who have returned year after year since 2020 to count ballots. They know what they went through in 2020. They know what potentially is coming down the pike for this upcoming election next week, and they're still committed to doing their job. They do a great job, and I'm confident that our elections are going to be accurately counted.
Well, Commissioner Bluestein, thanks so much, and good luck next Tuesday.
Thanks, David. I appreciate I get it.
One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paulo Ortiz and me, David Ryan.
Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Fez Jamil.
Matt Dempsey is our production manager.
Dan D'Azula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manessari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, Jamie Sandrace, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namerou. Remember, head over to cnen. Com/vote for the CNN Voter Handbook. Everything you need to know about voting before next Tuesday.
And head over to cnen.
Com or check out the CNN 5 Things podcast for the very latest on the campaign.
We'll be back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.
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