Commonwealth officials and immigration advocates buckling in for whatever Election Day throws their way

As Election Day approaches, local officials and legal experts across the commonwealth are preparing for a range of eventualities – from federal monitors at polling places to electrical outages, legal disputes or even cyberattacks.

On Monday, several officials, past and present, shared concerns and strategies at an online forum on Pennsylvania election preparation hosted by Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization.

“In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, elections departments are, in essence, preparing for three different elections,” said Republican Julie Wheeler, the York County commissioner and president of its Board of Elections. These include in-person voting on Election Day and a range of mail voting, including absentee, military and overseas ballots; in York, Wheeler said, 40,000 mail ballots have been requested thus far and 25,000 have been returned.

“And then the third, somewhat unique to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is: voters have the opportunity to go into an elections office and request a ballot over the counter,” she added. “Those activities are all occurring simultaneously – and our elections departments are working diligently to ensure that those elections go off without a hitch.”

Romilda Crocamo, the Luzerne County manager and a Democrat, detailed the sheer scale of the behind-the-scenes work that counties undertake to ensure fair elections.

With 186 precincts, Luzerne officials are organizing more than 1,200 poll workers across 138 polling places, along with 186 ballot boxes and secure ballot bags, 186 accessible booths, and 186 transport cages to move all of those ballots and equipment to a secured, videotaped room.

“So if you’re not able to sleep at three o’clock in the morning like I am, you can go on our website and look at our ballots,” Crocamo joked. “The breadth of the work that has to be done for an election – it’s really overwhelming.”

Despite all those preparations, the security and integrity of U.S. elections has been persistently called into question, with conspiracy theories flourishing across social media and amplified by right-wing commentators – including President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly suggested that mail voting encourages fraud.

Former Gov. Tom Corbett, an attorney who chairs Keep Our Republic’s Pennsylvania Advisory Council, expressed frustration with the persistence of narratives around illegitimate mail ballots or subversive election workers.

“I think people are tired of that,” the Republican former governor said of the conspiratorial lines of thinking. “There are different ways to vote than there were eight, 10 years ago, and I think people are getting accustomed to that.”

He added that poll workers are a largely volunteer corps, “neighbors to all of us that are voting there … For somebody to allege that there is some kind of conspiracy to overturn the election process is ludicrous in my mind,” he added. “I’ve been a prosecutor most of my public career, and I always say, give me the proof, give me the evidence – and have yet to see any evidence produced.”

Instead, election officials have to prepare for more rational threats ­– including power outages and cyberattacks. Wheeler related how, several years ago, York County formed an emergency preparedness task force – including representatives from the district attorney’s, sheriff’s and emergency management offices – to brainstorm responses to such potential scenarios.

“And then on Election Day, that team of individuals – they meet about seven times throughout the day via conference call,” she added, “so that we can be as proactive as we can to address situations that may arise.”

They won’t be the only ones on hand to intervene. Judge John Jones, the president of Dickinson College and former chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, noted that Pennsylvania’s Court of Common Pleas will be in session from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. on Election Day, “and longer if need be,” he said, ensuring that judges are on hand in all 67 counties to arbitrate any day-of-voting-related disputes.

“That could involve access; that could involve the conduct of the election. It could involve moving a polling place if something untoward happens, that a polling place is blocked through some mechanism,” said Jones, a Republican. “The first recourse typically is to get a judge involved on an emergent basis, and that's what they’re there for.”

In some counties, the federal government will also be watching. Crocamo said Luzerne was among the Pennsylvania counties notified of the expected presence of Department of Justice monitors on Election Day.

She added that DOJ monitors are hardly a novelty, having been present in 2022 and 2024 as well. “We have many monitors that come to Luzerne County; the ACLU will be here,” she noted. “We have nothing to hide, and we will follow state law.”

Corbett and Jones both noted that federal election monitors must observe in a non-partisan, non-interventional way. “Their single role would be to observe and to report back,” explained Jones. “They have no power to stop an election or to interfere with the conduct of an election. They’re there merely there to observe.”