‘Local’ PA Election News Might Be Repackaged Leftist Messaging

News consumers should be aware that a left-leaning group is targeting “local journalists” in battleground states with talking points on how to cover elections. In Pennsylvania, Democrat operatives coached reporters to be suspicious of “Republican activists” and elected officials who may raise legitimate concerns about how elections are run in this country.

Last week, the left-leaning nonprofit Knight Foundation hosted an “Election Law Forum” for Pennsylvania journalists as part of a virtual series promising to “equip journalists with essential, nonpartisan, fact-based knowledge on election law to better inform their communities in the lead-up to the 2024 elections and beyond,” according to an invitation. The forum was presented in partnership with the American Bar Association’s Task Force for American Democracy and Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law.

It seemed obvious the Pennsylvania training would take a left-leaning slant just from a look at the speaker list. The training included panelists former U.S. Representative Conor Lamb, a Democrat and a multiple-time political guest on MSNBC; Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat who was Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State in 2020; and Eric Kraeutler, a recently retired intellectual property litigator, according to his bio, and the current chair of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia nonprofit that has “recently … pursued election and campaign reform policies that align with Democratic priorities,” according to InfluenceWatch. The session was facilitated by moderators Tracie Potts, of the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, and Katie Meyer of Spotlight PA, a digital news outlet funded in part by the Knight Foundation.

With no strong right-leaning voice to offer a diverse perspective, the training had anti-Trump and anti-Republican voter undertones.

Expect Late Changing Results

The panel told reporters what they may expect in Pennsylvania on Election Day.

Most Pennsylvania counties will have their ballots counted on election night, Kraeutler predicted, but not the big counties: Philadelphia and Allegheny.

“In an election as close as what is being forecast, by the end of the day, Donald Trump will be ahead in Pennsylvania. That will make him the apparent winner in Pennsylvania,” Krautler said, but he noted reporters must remember that can still change. “These other jurisdictions have a Democratic voter registration advantage, and it will be important that [Democratic advantage] is to be expected.”

The process is slowed by massive numbers of mail-in ballots to count, the panel said.

In 2016, Pennsylvania voters cast 260,000 absentee ballots, Boockvar said. In 2020, the rules changed, and the Pennsylvania General Election had 2.6 million mail ballots.

Counties cannot start counting mail ballots until the polls close. The number of ballots being processed at once slows the count, Boockvar said.

Kraeutler urged reporters to help solve this issue by “shining a light” on what he called an easy fix: pre-canvassing. This would allow counties to open ballot envelopes, unfold ballots, and prepare them to be sent through the scanner before the polls close, he said.

“The Legislature needs to step up, and they haven’t,” Kraeutler told reporters. “One thing journalists can do is give a little push to our Legislature.”  

But participating in advocacy is beyond the scope of a traditional journalist.

The training advised reporters to help educate the public that Pennsylvania election results should not be expected for several days, and, although they used to be able to count results and offer “unofficial results” before dawn, it should now be seen as normal for results to remain unknown for days. Results are unofficial until the election is certified.

In Pennsylvania, and many other states, Boockvar said, election results are not certified for 20 days after Election Day.

“The whole concept of having results on election night actually has never been true. It has always been false. We have always not had results until 20 days after Election Day,” Boockvar told reporters. “The election night reporting websites that now exist — those only exist for one reason, and it’s to fill humans’ need to feel like they know what’s going on quickly in this country. And it’s actually a real problem for election officials.”

After an election, counties have many tasks before they certify their county election results. Provisional ballots must be figured out. Overseas voters, which Boockvar characterized as mostly military, don’t have to have their ballots in until a week after Election Day.

“Any counting or calling of an election before that, is basically disenfranchising people who are literally serving our country overseas.” Boockvar said. “Press can be telling people this [delay in results] is all normal. This is the process that always existed. This is not something that’s a problem. The more you can be talking about that, the better.”

She told reporters that in 2020, former President Donald Trump used the delay in getting results as “an opportunity to infuse doubt and suspicions and conspiracy theories.”

Boockvar did not acknowledge that not only Trump, but voters, too, had reasons to ask legitimate questions about how the election was handled in 2020. It was hard for voters to understand how Joe Biden — who barely went out on the campaign trail, who could not articulate his thoughts clearly, who drew very small crowds to his campaign events — received so many votes.   

The idea of not knowing results until the count is certified is a new talking point that started making the rounds in 2020 and is back this cycle. In Arizona, Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates reportedly said it could take close to two weeks to “finalize” results, and officials claim that this is completely normal, according to KJZZ Radio .

Don’t Report Everything You See

“We have to stop hating each other so much,” said Krautler, who is a retired litigator, not a journalist. He essentially dissuaded reporters from reporting what they see with their own eyes on Election Day.  

“I think, from the standpoint of journalists, we have to pay attention to what’s said before the polls close. We’ve obviously touched on some of the expected problems that are coming. It’s going to come from the Republican side,” Krautler said. “In the last election, in other states, there was overheated reporting about how long the lines are; that people didn’t have food or water; and all this kind of thing. You just have to keep in mind, that may keep people home … If there is any intended disruption at the polls, realize that overheated reporting of that may keep people home — may disrupt the election much more broadly than you know … We have to bring the temperature down, and we also have to realize, especially on the part of journalists, that anything we say before the polls close could have an influence that we don’t anticipate.”

But the media is supposed to tell the truth, not hold back information because of undefined consequences.

Boockvar advised reporters to consider “the human impact” their reporting might have on people who may lash out at election officials. (In other words, please don’t write things that will make people mad at them.)

Look for Problems In Red Counties

Throughout the training, the panel, including former Rep. Lamb, urged reporters to tell the public to trust the process and to trust election officials.

Then the training that begged reporters to help bring down the temperature, transitioned into a blatantly partisan conversation, with the question: “What keeps you up at night?”  

Meyer asked Lamb about what she called “open hostility [in 2020] coming  from Pennsylvania representatives in Congress about how people were handling election misinformation.” She said allegations of fraud were being made on pretty big stages.

“A lot of those folks are still in Congress,” Meyer said. “Do you have any sense of whether people have changed the way they intend to deal with these issues? Are people still making these claims of fraud? Are you expecting that there’s going to be the same level of willingness to do that this year?”

Lamb predicted some of Pennsylvania’s Republican election workers will improperly “follow Trump’s lead,” and refuse to certify county election results.

“That’s what they did in 2020, and I think that’s what they’re going to do again,” Lamb said. “One of the things that keeps me up at night is that last time, I don’t think there was as much pressure trained on county-level authorities, at least in Pennsylvania, when it comes to doing that county-level certification step and moving [results] to the state … I just worry about what happens if you have some of these red rural county folks refuse to certify their vote total because of some specious, misty cloud of fraud claims that people have raised. Legally there should be a mechanism to deal with it.”

The Federalist questioned Lamb about this statement through a written chat on the Zoom call: Was Lamb really saying election officials should be trusted, except those in small, red counties?

“I wasn’t trying to suggest that this is a problem only in those places, or that they shouldn’t be trusted at all,” Lamb said. “I was pointing out the political pressure that I have seen evidence of in the last four years which is different. There has been a lot of citizen pressure, particularly at the county-level public meetings that I’m aware of in more rural counties, and there has been extensive conversation among, I guess you could call them, Republican activists, about whether holding back the certification would be an effective tactic in their view, to deal with what they perceive as problems coming from the left.”

This is apparently just one of several media training forums the Knight Foundation and the American Bar Association’s Task Force for American Democracy are offering. Descriptions of the “virtual events” note they are “focused on state-specific election law issues” and “tailored for local journalists in key battleground states.”

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.