The Shapiro administration is reviewing President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order that overhauls U.S. elections. Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said Thursday Gov. Josh Shapiro will do everything in his power to protect voting rights.
“There’s a lot there for us to assess, whether it’s from providing in person, documentation of citizenship when registering to voting, to what voting systems can be certified,” Schmidt said in a press briefing on Trump administration cuts to a federal agency that monitors and warns states of threats to election security.
While an executive order could not overrule federal and state election law, staff at the Pennsylvania Department of State and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Office of General Council are working to identify possible consequences and what issues could be litigated, Schmidt said.
Trump signed the order Tuesday requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. It’s aligned with the president’s campaign trail rhetoric about non citizens voting in federal elections and his strongarm tactics on immigration.
U.S.House Republicans have prioritized passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, which would codify parts of the order. Trump’s order uses the threat of losing federal funding to compel states to comply. It directs the Election Assistance Commission, which distributes federal grants, to require people registering to vote to provide proof of citizenship such as a passport or state-issued ID.
Last week, Schmidt warned U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that cuts to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency program that helps monitor and prepare for election threats will “make elections less secure.”
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Thursday, Schmidt said the resources CISA provides aren’t available anywhere else and withdrawing them will affect the state and counties’ capabilities.
“They participated in our election threat task force that Governor Shapiro set up in advance of the 2024 election, so that federal, state and local partners were in regular communication with one another,” Schmidt said.
“We saw the value of that … when we did have some threats targeting our county election operations on Election Day,” he said.
Several county election offices received bomb threats around the time polls closed on Nov. 5. In the week before the election, a fake video showing mail-in ballots cast for Trump and Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) being destroyed and thrown away was linked to a Russian disinformation campaign.
“CISA was able to quickly identify not only that it was fraudulent, but also the source of it, so that we could share with our counties and we could share with the public so confidence in the election wasn’t undermined,” Schmidt said.
Suzanne Spaulding was under secretary for cybersecurity and infrastructure at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration. CISA is responsible for protecting assets, systems and networks “necessary for our ways of life,” Spaulding said in the press briefing.
“It’s clear that election infrastructure meets that definition, and it was officially designated as critical infrastructure in 2017,” she said, noting that Trump’s latest order maintains that definition.
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The election security mission took on heightened importance in 2016 when the presidential election brought a marked uptick in cyber espionage, Spaulding said. Primarily from Russia, it targeted election infrastructure ranging from voter registration processes and databases, ballot preparation, tabulation, reporting results and news wire services that informed the public.
Initial efforts to help state and local governments safeguard their systems were met with skepticism from officials who were wary of a federal takeover of elections, Spaulding said.Over the following eight years, CISA worked to build trust by providing nonpartisan assistance over a range of election-related cyber, physical and informational realms.
“Sadly, the election security work related work at CISA seems to have stopped. The men and women who are doing this vital work at CISA have been placed on administrative leave. The funding has been eliminated,” Spaulding said.
Deborah McCarthy, former U.S. ambassador to Lithuania, lead a team at the United Nations negotiating an international treaty to allow American law enforcement to pursue cyber criminals around the world. Russia remains a serious threat to cyber security, she said, but Iran and China have also shown clear intent to influence elections through fake social media posts and phony news reports and by building relationships with state and local officials.
China has also engaged in cyber attacks on U.S. communications infrastructure.
“Now they’ve penetrated our U.S. telecoms companies and internet providers, accessing messages, text messages, IP addresses and, in some cases, audio recordings. It’s unclear what they’re going to do with this information, but they hold a lot and they’re still present,” McCarthy said.
Asked why the Trump administration implemented cuts to the election security program, Schmidt said they are aligned with the false perception that election administrators are adversaries.
“I can’t really speak to their motives,” Schmidt said. “I can’t really speak to their thought process. But clearly, the fact is that election administration has been perceived as being partisan, political and seeking to influence the outcome of elections, which is not the case in Pennsylvania.”
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