Transcript

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Our next guest, Al Schmidt, had a memorable experience in the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump has long claimed was stolen. Back then, Schmidt was the lone Republican on the three-member election board of Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. Schmidt helped supervise and publicly defended the integrity of the long and tedious count of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots. The count took days and eventually gave Democrat Joe Biden the state's 20 electoral votes. But it earned Schmidt nationally reported insults from then-President Trump and threats from some of his followers.

Today Schmidt is secretary of the commonwealth, the chief voting official for all of Pennsylvania, which will again be a critically contested state in a national election with high stakes for Donald Trump.…