Chalkbeat

Students across Pennsylvania step up on Election Day to keep democracy working

2026-06-05T18:52:21+00:00

This story was originally published by Votebeat. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

If you’ve voted in person in Pennsylvania recently, you may have noticed that one of the poll workers checking you in was a high school student. And if you ask one of them why they wanted to be a poll worker, most will give a similar answer.

“My school was offering it, and I thought it would be a good piece of money,” explained Aiden Martinez, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School in Philadelphia.

Aiden Martinez, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School stands for a portrait at the state capitol after winning one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards in Harrisburg, Pa. on May 27, 2026.

But, once the allure of a paycheck and a day off school has faded away, they’ll tell you something else as well: They enjoy getting to see the voting process up close.

“I kept going back afterward because it was interesting to see everyone in my community … and how seriously they took voting,” Martinez said. “It kind of inspired me to come back, and for my last year that I worked there, I voted too.”

In Pennsylvania, 17-year-olds are eligible to be poll workers, and each year high school students staff voting sites across the state. And they’re not just stuck in corners or being sent to fetch coffee, either; they are meaningfully involved in running the polls.

Advocates of the practice say it both helps counties fill a staffing gap and gives students valuable life experience.

In Lebanon County, student poll workers have become an integral part of the county’s Election Day workforce. During the May 2026 primary, students made up 13% of all poll workers, and Jamie Shoemaker, the county’s poll worker coordinator, said she’s trying to increase that number.

Shoemaker had hands-on experience with the program before taking it over full time. Shoemaker was a pollworker in her mother’s precinct before joining the county elections office, and one year her own high school aged daughter helped out as well. Her daughter, she said, ended up enjoying the experience.

That was in 2019, when Lebanon County was mainly working with Lebanon High School to find students to work the polls. But after Shoemaker began working at the county elections department full time, she expanded the program to other high schools in the area. The county now averages about 50 to 55 student poll workers each election.

Kayla Marshall, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School, stands for a portrait at the state capitol after winning one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards.

Jeannetta Dormil, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School stands for a portrait at the state capitol after winning one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards.

Andrew Abreu, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School stands for a portrait at the state capitol after winning one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards.

Aiden Martinez, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School stands for a portrait at the state capitol after winning one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards.

Tanicha Cadesca, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School walks throug a hallway during a portrait at the state capitol after winning one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards in Harrisburg.

Rebecca Torres, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School sits for a portrait at the state capitol after winning one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards.

Rubiel Gutierrez, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School sits for a portrait at the state capitol after winning one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards.

Shane Hannigan, a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School stands for a portrait at the state capitol after winning one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards.

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt stands alongside students from Franklin Towne Charter High School after they received the Governor’s Civic Engagement Award.

The students do all types of jobs in the polling place, from checking voters in to keeping track of turnout and helping voters feed their ballots into tabulation machines.

Many non-student poll workers in Lebanon — and nationally — skew older. And as elections become more technologically integrated with devices such as electronic pollbooks, older poll workers sometimes struggle to adapt.

“Having the student there helps bridge that tech gap,” she said. “They can just look at it and know [what the issue is].”

Keith Rolon is the cooperative education teacher at Lebanon High School and manages the school’s student poll worker program. His goal is to have two students at each of the city’s polling sites, including at least one who is bilingual to help translate for the city’s large Spanish-speaking population.

“For me as a civics teacher, it was important for me to show them voting is important and elections are safe and here’s what goes into them,” he said.

It’s also an opportunity for students to learn valuable life skills like self-advocacy that Rolon said can’t be learned in the classroom. During the primary, as he does every Election Day, he traveled around to all the polling places in the city to check on his students.

At the Lebanon County Senior Center in the city’s 10th ward, he stopped in to see senior Ella Whalen and junior Emely Liriano. Whalen was recording which voters came in on a numbered list, and Liriano was seated next to her checking them in on the polling place’s e-pollbook.

The judge of elections gave Rolon a positive review of their performance so far, and Rolon reminded them it was their responsibility to speak up for themselves when it was time for them to take a break or get lunch.

Whalen and Liriano agreed the money they got from working the polls was nice, but the act of being civically engaged was appealing too. Their parents are politically active, and Whalen said it was good to help out.

It was both Whalen’s and Liriano’s first time working an election, and although turnout was rather low (as usual for a primary), they said they still learned about the voting process.

“It surprised me how quick it was,” Liriano said. “You just go in, you check off the boxes, you put [the ballot] in the thing, and then you leave. I didn’t even know there was a machine that you just put your ballots in.”

Students from Franklin Towne Charter High School walk out before receiving the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards at the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pa. on May 27, 2026.

Diane Gordian, the civic engagement and language access engagement coordinator for the Pennsylvania Department of State, helps organize student poll worker programs across Pennsylvania. She said a benefit of the programs is that they help students, and importantly also their families, build habits of democratic engagement.

“Those students come home and say, ‘Hey Mom and Dad, I want to do this,’ and that gets those parents motivated, not only to register to vote, but they sign up to be poll workers,” she said.

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt hands one of the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards, to a student from Franklin Towne Charter High School at the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pa. on May 27, 2026.

The state is still tallying numbers from the primary, but Gordian said she expects this year to have the highest-ever rate of students serving as poll workers.

Each year, the state honors certain students and their schools with the Governor’s Civic Engagement Award for registering eligible student voters and for working as poll workers.

Martinez, from Franklin Towne Charter High School, was one of the 633 students who received that award this year, and he and eight of his peers recently spoke about their experiences at a press conference with Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt.

Kayla Marshall, another student at Franklin Towne Charter, said the poll worker programs give students a chance to actually experience civic engagement rather than just hearing about it “in a PowerPoint at 8 in the morning while trying not to fall asleep.” Marshall worked the polls in three elections starting in November 2024.

Kayla Marshall delivers remarks on the Governor’s Civic Engagement Awards, alongside fellow students from Franklin Towne Charter High School at the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pa. on May 27, 2026.

“Working the polls taught me more than just how elections work,” she said. “It taught me responsibility, teamwork, patience, and the importance of giving back. It also showed me that young people don’t have to wait until ‘someday’ to make a difference.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Lycoming County concludes its recount of the 2020 presidential election

2023-01-11T21:30:36+00:00

Update, 4:30 p.m. ET, Jan 11: Over two and a half days, roughly 20 county employees hand counted more than 59,000 ballots at an average pace of 55.5 ballots per minute, exceeding the county’s original expectations.

With extra time at his disposal, Lycoming County Elections Director Forrest Lehman had workers recount roughly 18 batches of ballots where the number of ballots counted by employees did not match the expected number of ballots in the batch. In many cases, employees discovered that mismatches were due to human error in the recount process — not the original count from poll workers on election night. This discovery underscores the inaccuracies of hand counts, Lehman said.

Those performing the hand count also made a series of other basic errors. For example, one team of ballot counters turned in a tally sheet where they had made 41 tally marks for a candidate, but wrote 44 in the “total” line. That 44 was then crossed out at 41 was written next to the total line. Another team counted 408 ballots in its batch, though the original count indicated the number should be 412. A county worker then discovered three ballots were stuck to the bottom of the box and the team recounted the whole batch, arriving at 412.

Lehman expects to release numbers on the changes in the overall number ballots and candidates’ total votes later this week, and he hopes to have a more detailed report on how the recount went later in the month.

Original article published Jan. 9:

More than two years after the last ballot was cast in the 2020 election, Lycoming County plans to recount all presidential votes by hand — an extraordinary step no other Pennsylvania county has taken.

County commissioners ordered the recount under pressure from activists associated with an election conspiracy group and against the advice of the local election director, who told proponents it would be a poor use of resources and unlikely to show the fraud they feared.

The county will begin the recount of roughly 60,000 ballots Monday in a labor-intensive process that could last as long as three weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Audit the Vote PA and similar groups that promote baseless conspiracy theories about elections have argued for hand recounts and forensic audits across the state, though those efforts have largely failed. York County agreed to hand-count three precincts in last year’s election, and Butler County performed a smaller hand recount of the 2020 election.

But the push for a broader review picked up traction in Lycoming, a largely rural county of slightly more than 100,000 people in north central Pennsylvania, best known for hosting the Little League World Series every summer. A petition calling for the recount was signed by 5,000 people, something that didn’t happen in other counties.

Forrest Lehman, the county’s election director, doesn’t think the recount will convince election skeptics to trust the process.

“I think there’s 5,000 people out there who signed a petition indicating at least some level of mistrust or misunderstanding on how our elections works and I think at some level that will always be there,” he said.

Why is Lycoming performing a hand recount?

The push for the recount began after the 2020 election, according to a lawsuit filed against the county by the Lycoming County Patriots as well as a statement from local Audit the Vote PA volunteer and lawyer Karen DiSalvo.

Former U.S. Army Captain Seth Keshel, a well-known figure in election denial circles, released a report claiming that President Joe Biden’s strong performance in places like Lycoming County suggested fraud.

He cited growing Republican registration and dwindling numbers of Democrats, and compared that to the fact that Biden received 30% more votes in 2020 than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

Experts have repeatedly said such trends are not indicative of fraud.

Registered Democrats and Republicans can decide to cast ballots for candidates from other parties. On top of that, turnout for all voters across the U.S. was high in 2020, and Biden’s total in Lycoming was less than the number of registered Democrats in the county. Former President Donald Trump also gained a greater number of votes relative to Republican registration.

But some people were nevertheless skeptical. Last winter, DiSalvo led a group of Audit the Vote PA volunteers in a door-to-door canvassing effort, searching for evidence of fraud.

Nearly half of surveyed houses, the volunteers claimed, had “anomalies” such as people saying they voted but having no vote recorded or more voters registered to an address than occupants. But the group has not released its raw data, and a similar effort by Audit the Vote in Lancaster County failed to ask basic questions, such as whether the person surveyed at a residence had actually been registered at that same address in 2020.

DiSalvo’s group then circulated a petition asking the county for 10 elections-related concessions that together represented a radical overhaul, including ceasing the use of electronic vote-counting machines, conducting a forensic audit of the 2020 election, and performing a hand recount.

Lehman repeatedly pushed back against the arguments DiSalvo and others made.

“I don’t believe anything presented here today currently justifies the extraordinary request to recount a two-year-old election,” Lehman said at a June meeting, according to a local news report. “No one was entitled to a specific outcome in the presidential election based on what voter registration totals or polling data might’ve suggested to them.”

The petition for a recount eventually amassed roughly 5,000 signatures, and in October the county commissioners voted along party lines to go ahead.

How will it work?

In an interview with Votebeat and Spotlight PA this week, Lehman said that, because there was no precedent for such a hand recount in the state, he had to “invent the wheel, basically.”

Forty county employees will participate, divided into 20 teams of one counter and one recorder each.

Ballots will be divided into roughly 180 batches based on ballot type, such as in-person, mail, or provisional. Teams will count one batch at a time, with batches ranging in size from one ballot to 1,400. The teams will only recount the presidential and the state auditor general races.

Recorders will use a tally sheet to record marks for each candidate choice, overvotes, or write-in that appears on the ballots.

“If that sounds inelegant, it’s because there is no real elegant way to do a hand count,” Lehman said. “You’re taking a process that is automated and making it analog.”

The count will be overseen by party representatives and open to reporters. DiSalvo said she is scheduled to watch parts of the count.

Lehman said he is hoping to complete the bulk of the work in one week, but the count is scheduled to continue through Jan. 31 if needed.

The commissioners have estimated the recount will cost roughly $55,000, and Lehman said he will be tracking expenses.

What will the end result be?

Experts, academics, and local officials, including Lehman, have repeatedly pointed out the inaccuracy of hand recounts, which introduce more potential for human error than machine counting. Lehman also noted that the county already performs audits after each election to ensure accuracy.

“I believe there is no way this hand count will be as accurate as the voting equipment,” Lehman said, stressing that the recount is unlikely to change the results. Small shifts, however, are possible for several reasons.

First, when election workers collected and counted their voted, unvoted, provisional, and other ballot types at the end of election night, they may have slightly miscounted the amount in each batch, and small errors like this are often discovered during recounts.

Also, humans and machines will interpret marks on the ballot differently. A mark that crosses between two candidates’ bubbles may trigger debate over the voter’s intent.

When this occurs, voter intent is determined by a team of bipartisan observers.

Finally, there is simple human error. If a volunteer gets distracted while counting a large batch of ballots, they may lose track of which ballots have or haven’t been counted, but Lehman said he has worked to minimize potential distractions.

Will it change minds?

Lehman is unsure about whether the recount will satisfy skeptics. The Lycoming County Patriots are suing the county claiming the commissioners are obligated to comply with all 10 of their requests, not just the recount.

“This hand count is one piece of the puzzle,” DiSalvo said in a statement. “We have paper ballots for a reason. We want to see if the paper ballots match the machine counts reported.”

In response to a follow-up question about whether she thought the recount would assuage concerns, DiSalvo said she didn’t expect the findings to be off by more than a few votes. She said rebuilding trust in the local process is the ultimate goal.

Lehman said the country’s approach to election technology has shifted over the years, moving toward fully electronic voting systems in the early 2000s and then, in recent years, shifting in the other direction. Lehman thinks the current balance between technology and manual work is about right, but he recognizes that not everyone will be convinced.

Still, “we’ve got to find a way as a country to get away from where we are now,” he said. “It’s OK for people to not be OK with the outcome of an election, but it’s not OK to have the conversation we are having right now. It’s not OK to only trust elections when your candidate wins. That is extremely corrosive.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt nominated for secretary of the commonwealth

2023-01-05T13:00:00+00:00

Al Schmidt, a Republican who famously stood up to former President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020 while receiving death threats, has been nominated to be Pennsylvania’s top election official.

Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said in a press release that he selected Schmidt to lead the Pennsylvania Department of State because he was “an integral part of the effort to protect our democracy and stop Pennsylvanians’ votes from being thrown out” after the 2020 election. Schmidt served as a city commissioner overseeing elections in Philadelphia for 10 years.

“Al Schmidt has a proven track record of defending our democracy, protecting voting rights, and standing up to extremism — even in the face of grave threats — and I am proud to nominate him to be Pennsylvania’s next Secretary of the Commonwealth,” Shapiro said in the press release.

In an interview late Wednesday with Votebeat and SpotlightPA, Schmidt said his priorities included improving voter registration processes as well as the way votes are cast and counted, positions that align with those Shapiro outlined on the campaign trail.

Schmidt also stressed the need to push back on election misinformation, something he highlighted in response to a question about how the Department of State could support local elections directors, who have been leaving the job in droves.

“A great benefit will be that I’ve run elections on the ground for the past [10] years, really knowing what counties need to be successful,” he said. “A component of that, and something I really valued, was monitoring election lies seeking to undermine confidence in the results in Philly, which were broadcast well in advance. It is important not to ignore those lies because they cause harm.”*

The selection marks Shapiro’s first cabinet-level appointment, fulfilling a campaign promise, and is an unusual nomination across the partisan divide. He must still be confirmed by the state Senate.

The events around the 2020 election boosted Schmidt’s profile from that of a local elections official to that of a trusted national voice on elections administration and misinformation.

Philadelphia’s election was under heavy scrutiny in 2020 as workers counted an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, a task that spanned days. Conspiracy theories about integrity of the election and the process in Philadelphia were running rampant on social media, and Schmidt began giving national media interviews debunking them.

For example, speaking to CNN, Schmidt pushed back about claims of dead people voting. Asked about other claims from Trump, he said, “I think people should be mindful that there are bad actors who are lying to them.”

Shortly after that interview, Trump tweeted that Schmidt, whom he referred to as a Republican-in-name-only, was “being used big time by the Fake News Media” and was refusing to look at Trump’s claims of election fraud.

If there had been fraud, Schmidt said Philadelphia officials would have looked into it and referred it to law enforcement, as he had personally done in the past.

Schmidt’s stance led to a backlash from Trump and his allies, and no Republican officials in the state came to his defense.

Schmidt’s priorities

Schmidt said he intends to push for process improvements, specifically mentioning the need for time to pre-canvass mail ballots, something he said he’s heard near-universal agreement on.

“It’s a problem and everyone knows it’s a problem, and it’s something other states have been able to solve easily by allowing pre-canvassing before Election Day,” he said.

He said the lack of pre-canvassing forces delays in reporting election results, leaving a vulnerability bad actors can exploit.

At the beginning of 2022, Schmidt resigned from his role as commissioner and became president of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based good-government group that has historically advocated for election reforms.

Over the summer, Schmidt was also one of the witnesses offering live testimony to a U.S. House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

He told the committee that after Trump’s tweet, he received much more “specific” and “graphic” threats directed at him and at his family. One such threat came in the form of an email to his wife, according to the New York Times, which read “HEADS ON SPIKES. TREASONOUS SCHMIDTS” and included a photo of the exterior of their house.

Schmidt has continued to speak out since 2020 against his fellow Republicans when he believed they were pursuing poor election policy, such as the state Senate’s attempt to audit the 2020 election.

“The Senate is labeling this undertaking a ‘full forensic investigation,’ an ‘election integrity’ review, and — perhaps most absurdly — an ‘audit,’” read an op-ed he co-authored. “These terms might sound official, but in reality, they only serve to hide the dangerous nature of the Senate’s actions.”

He also advocated for changes through editorials written with the current Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth, Leigh Chapman, and in testimony to U.S. Senate’s Rules Committee about the threats faced by election administrators.

While most governors fill their cabinets with members of their own party, it’s not unheard of for them to make cross-party nominations, said G. Terry Madonna, senior fellow in residence for political affairs at Millersville University. He noted Shapiro’s transition team includes several Republicans.

Election administration became one of the top issues during the 2022 gubernatorial campaign.

Shapiro’s opponent, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, repeatedly emphasized in interviews the governor’s power to pick the state’s top election official. Shapiro highlighted Mastriano’s support of Trump’s 2020 fraud claims and amplified widespread speculation that Mastriano was planning to appoint Toni Shuppe, an election conspiracy theorist who leads Audit the Vote PA, as secretary.

Schmidt, 51, is originally from Pittsburgh and graduated from Allegheny College in 1993 with a B.A. in history.

After obtaining a doctorate in history from Brandeis University in 2000, he worked for five years as a senior analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office before coming to Philadelphia to serve as the executive director of the city’s Republican committee and then as an adviser to the state Republican Party.

He ran unsuccessfully for city controller in 2009, then won a seat on the Philadelphia City Commission in 2011, spending the next 10 years helping to oversee elections in the state’s largest municipality.

“Al Schmidt is someone I worked side-by-side with for over a decade,” said Seth Bluestein, Schmidt’s former deputy who then succeeded him as city commissioner, in an interview with Votebeat and SpotlightPA. “His professionalism and integrity are unmatched, and I am confident he will be an excellent secretary of state.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Correction, Jan 5, 2023: A quote in this article originally misstated the length of Schmidt’s experience running elections. It was 10 years, not 20 years.