Ready for November challenge
Boockvar primed for key role of overseeing count of state ballots
As it stands now, there’s no chance we’ll know which presidential candidate won Pennsylvania on election night, and possibly for several days afterward.
With the state expected to play a key role if not the determining role in whosits in the White House, the longer the count drags on, the more the pressure will rise on those doing the counting, especially Kathy Boockvar.
The Bucks County resident is the secretary of the common
wealth, in charge of overseeing elections. She’s new in the job, appointed last year by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.
In those two years, the state’s voting system has changed more than it did in the previous 80, the biggest change being the ability of anyone to vote by mail. Implementing that alone would be a challenge.
But Boockvar, in conjunction with county elections officials, has to do it during a pandemic, without adequate support from the state Legislature, at a time when the mail system stinks, and while being attacked by President Donald Trump, who contends the state’s system is being rigged against him.
Could that all add up to Boockvar being the next Katherine Harris? She was Florida’s secretary of state whofound herself in the national spotlight during the Bush-Gore recount over “hanging chads” in 2000.
Boockvar sees no similarities between what’s going on in Pennsylvania nowand what happened in Florida two decades ago. She’s confident Pennsylvania is in a good position to hold a safe, secure, accurate election.
She acknowledges there are plenty of challenges, but says those challenges are exceeded by the hype.
“It’s going to take longer to count,” Boockvar said. “Does that make it less secure, make it less reliable? No. It’s not. It takes more time. It’s a very different analysis than the issues they had in Florida back in the day.”
Boockvar, who turns 52 in a few weeks, is a Democrat who lives in Washington Crossing. She has worked most of her career as an attorney, including a few years in the mid-1990s at Lehigh Valley Legal Services in Bethlehem, where she assisted low-income clients with civil rights, employment and other issues.
For about a decade, she was in practice with her husband, Jordan Yeager, now a judge in Bucks County. After that, she worked on voter advocacy to eliminate barriers to voting, for the civil rights organization Advancement Project.
She was chief counsel for the state auditor general, then executive director of Lifecycle WomanCare, a nonprofit birthing center in Bryn Mawr that is one of the oldest in the nation.
She’s a former poll worker and a former candidate. In 2011, she ran unsuccessfully for Commonwealth Court. In 2012, she ran unsuccessfully for Congress. During that race, Boockvar was critical of her Republican opponent, incumbent Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick.
In a campaign email, she wrote: “Congressman Fitzpatrick has spent the past year voting with the Tea Party to end Medicare, cut benefits to veterans, gut environmental protections, and deny tax breaks for the middle class, all for partisan power politics,” according to politicspa.com.
As secretary of the commonwealth, Boockvar says she is committed to impartiality.
“I swear an oath that I amhere to represent, to oversee elections — fair, free, safe, secure and accessible elections. I don’t care who is on the ballot. I don’t care who is running against them. I want to make sure every candidate has an opportunity to run and win and make sure that every vote for or against them is counted accurately.
“And I will fight to the end on behalf of any candidate. I don’t care whether I agree with them or I don’t agree with them.”
She joined the Department of State in 2018 as a senior adviser to Wolf on election modernization. In 2019, Wolf appointed her to lead the department. She was confirmed by the state Senate in November 2019.
The department does more than run elections. It runs the state’s occupational licensing program for medical and other professionals, licenses businesses and regulates charities.
Boockvar told me that when she was offered the chance to lead the department, she saw how it touched all of the jobs she had held.
“I felt like it really was the convergence of all my professional paths into one position. It was really an opportunity of a lifetime.”
Boockvar was asked recently whether she had any expectations when she was appointed to the position.
“Yes, absolutely,” she replied. “It’s just that none of it applies anymore.”
The voting situation in Pennsylvania has changed that much in just a short time.
The changes are largely for the better, with mail voting making it easy for people to vote, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Every county also has a new voting system, as the Wolf administration required systems to have paper trails for security reasons.
But the changes have brought on the challenges that could result in Pennsylvania, and Boockvar, being in the national spotlight.
And it’s almost as if the Republican-controlled state Legislature wants to see that happen.
With as many as 3 million mail ballots expected, county election boards will need time to count them. But the Legislature hasn’t given them enough time to ensure a quick count.
Boockvar and Wolf asked lawmakers to change the election law to allow county elections officials to begin processing mail ballots three weeks in advance of the election. Lawmakers haven’t acted on their request. A bill is pending that would allow processing to begin three days before the election, but it has not advanced.
Boockvar has publicly criticized the legislative inaction.
“The failure to do that, it impacts voters, it impacts candidates, it impacts our nation,” she said. “It’s such an easy fix. And there’s no downside. It’s why this is frustrating. It’s not like there are negative implications of this.”
Even three days would make a difference, she said.
Then there’s Trump.
His campaign is suing the state on several fronts. It wants to ban the use of ballot drop boxes and is challenging advice from Boockvar to county elections officials that state law does not require or permit them to reject a mail ballot solely over a perceived signature inconsistency.
The Trump campaign also wants poll watchers to be allowed inside satellite elections offices that recently opened in Philadelphia to register voters, take applications for mail ballots and provide room for people to fill them out and return them.
The president referenced that situation during the nationally televised first presidential debate, saying, “Bad things happen in Philadelphia.”
That forced Boockvar to go on the offensive.
Trump’s people had no right to be in those offices, and the city was right to boot them. They aren’t polling places, Boockvar emphasized during an online news conference the next day. Poll watchers aren’t entitled to sit at your kitchen table and watch you fill out a mail ballot at home, and those offices are no different.
But mistakes at several county voting offices have hurt her calls for voters to be confident, forcing her to work harder. Counties have problems every year, but this year, everything is magnified.
In Luzerne County, nine military ballots were thrown in the trash, at least seven of them containing votes for Trump. Boockvar told reporters the ballots were discarded by mistake by a temporary worker who had not been adequately trained to identify military ballots, which can arrive in envelopes that don’t indicate what’s inside.
In Philadelphia, computer thumb drives used to program voting machines were stolen from a city warehouse along with the laptop of an employee from the machines’ manufacturer. In Allegheny County, some mail ballots were sent to voters with misprinted return envelopes that didn’t have the full declaration section that voters must fill out and sign for their ballot to be counted.
That has to frustrate Boockvar, whosays she has an “addiction to attention to detail.”
With lawsuits pending, there’s always a chance the voting landscape could change again if the courts issue rulings.
The state already had to mount
a last-minute voter education campaign to remind mail voters to follow the instructions carefully. That came after the state Supreme Court ruled that ballots returned without a signature on the outer return envelope will be disqualified, as will “naked ballots,” those not returned in the secrecy envelope.
The stress must be enormous, but Boockvar seems to be handling it well.
She’s maintained a sense of humor, such as when public officials in Pittsburgh posed topless, holding ballots across their chests, for a social media campaign to raise awareness about naked ballots. “I’m happy to say since other people seem to be taking up the naked advertising, I am going to continue to do clothed advertising. We want ballots to be clothed,” Boockvar joked during a recent news conference.
Boockvar has committed to keeping the public informed about Pennsylvania’s elections preparations. She started holding a weekly online news conference to provide updates and answer questions. She’s also been holding online interviews with media outlets, including The Morning Call.
She’s working 70 to 80 hours a week, speed-walking and walking her dog, Zoie, to clear her head when she can find the time. But that’s not always easy. “I get asked a lot what keeps you up at night or what’s worrisome to you. It’s misinformation and disinformation and the fueling of knocking down voter confidence.”