Pa. Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar had a big job overseeing election reform in Pa. Then COVID hit

Imagine starting a new job tasked with implementing one of the biggest changes to Pennsylvania's election system ahead of a presidential election — and then a pandemic hits.

Welcome to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar's reality since taking the job in January 2019.

Boockvar, 52, of Lower Makefield, was previously the senior election modernization advisor to Gov. Tom Wolf as the state implemented a statewide change from digital-only voting machines.

Election security concerns raised after the 2016 election prompted Wolf and then acting state Secretary Robert Torres in 2018 to require counties to switch to voting machines that created a paper voter-verifiable ballot by the 2020 General Election.

While that one change alone was a major undertaking to see through, Boockvar said it was really just the start of what would become a series of monumental election reforms in the state.

"We’ve seen more change to how voters can vote in Pennsylvania and how our elections are run in the last two and a half years than we've seen basically in the last century," Boockvar said in an interview last week.

And she has been at the forefront of those changes. 

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One of the biggest election reforms in the state came with Act 77 of 2019, which opened mail-in ballots any registered voter in the state by creating a no-excuse option to the state's election laws, allowing residents to cast a vote by mail even if they were going to be in their registered voting precincts on Election Day.

The change made casting a ballot easier for all voters when Gov. Tom Wolf signed Act 77 into law in October 2019, but Boockvar said it also meant removing barriers for some who might not be able to cast a ballot in person.

Voters who don't have a car or have multiple jobs, have a disability or limited mobility and historically disenfranchised communities like people of color now had an alternate choice to participate in an election where they previously had to show up to the polls, she said.

"To have choices is such an incredible expansion of access for eligible voters to exercise their vote," Boockvar said.

And then the coronavirus hit the commonwealth. 

While Act 77 may have been enacted to improve access and increase voter turnout, Boockvar said the law has played an unexpected role in keeping voting safe during the  pandemic.

The coronavirus came to Pennsylvania a little over a month before the 2020 primary, originally planned to take place on April 28.

The virus spread quickly throughout Pennsylvania in March and April, causing many non-essential businesses to shutter and calling into question if the upcoming primary could be held safely.

The state delayed the primary until June 2 with various health and safety changes like keeping voters six feet apart, consolidating some polling locations and providing polling places with cough masks and hand sanitizer.

It was the first time voters had a chance to use the new mail-in ballot option, and state health officials urged Pennsylvanian's to use it amid the pandemic.

About half of the 155,751 currently registered votes in Boovkvar's home county of Bucks in the Philadelphia suburbs who voted in the primary did so by absentee or mail-in ballot. 

Consider that in the 2016 primary, all but about 2% of the 161,838 currently registered voters in the county voted in person or by provisional ballot.

Now, with virus cases spiking again, nearly a third of the state's over 9 million currently registered voters have requested a ballot in the upcoming election, according to data on the state department's website.

And the election process and security of ballots has been a major issue leading up to Election Day, pushing Boockvar into a prime role across the state as she explains and sometimes defends the process, including when President Trump questioned the security of voting in Philadelphia with his now-famous "bad things" are happening in the city comments during the first debate. 

Boockvar assured residents they were not, explaining the law as it pertains to poll watchers.  

Advocate for voters

Boockvar said she's always had an interest in voter rights in broad terms, but it wasn't until 2008 that she first took on defending voter rights professionally as an attorney.

She volunteered locally as a poll worker in the mid 2000s, a recurring role Boockvar said sparked a more focused interest in voter rights.

Boockvar said it was in 2007 she had gotten involved with a group of Bensalem voters who were protesting a polling place change near the Creekside apartment complex at 2500 Knight Road.

The county Board of Elections, comprised by the then Republican-controlled county commissioners, voted to move the site a mile away from the apartment complex to the Polish Army Veterans hall.

Residents claimed moving the polling place after 30 years at Creekside in the township's 5th Lower Middle voting precinct was done to suppress the Democratic vote in the area.

Boockvar said some of the residents had reached out to her for help for things like filing petitions opposing the move.

Eventually, the county compromised on a third location between the former location and the new one.

That change appears to have been temporary, as the veterans hall is currently listed as the polling place for Bensalem's 4th and 5th Lower Middle voting precincts.

It was around this same time Boockvar's husband, Jordan Yeager, saw a job posting for a voting rights attorney with the national nonprofit Advancement Project.

The two had opened their own law practice in Doylestown Borough about a decade prior, and Boockvar said the job posting came at the same time they were considering expanding.

"We were sort of at a moment in time where we were either going to have to expand our practice or hook in with another firm, so we were at a good time for contemplating change," Boockvar said.

One of the group's main issues was fighting voter suppression in low-income communities and communities of color, an issue she had now had a newfound appreciation for with Creekside.

While the position was in Washington D.C., Boockvar sent in her resume in case the project was looking for a Pennsylvania-based attorney.

The group hired Boockvar to be its senior voting rights attorney in Pennsylvania, a position she held for about three years.

"It was such a great experience; this was an organization where their whole mission is to help voters exercise their fundamental right to vote," Boockvar said.

Working with the state department

The job meant Boockvar was often in communication with the state department in a full-time voting rights capacity.

Yeager continued practicing law in Bucks County with another firm before being elected a Bucks County Court of Common Pleas judge in 2019.

After working at the nonprofit, Boockvar's career continued placing her in regular contact with the state department in various ways.

As a candidate in two state races, Boockvar had to file campaign finance reports and other election requirements overseen by the state department.

Boockvar ran for a seat on the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court in 2011 and then as the Democratic challenger to late Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick in 2012 in what was then the state's 8th Congressional District.

Boockvar then took a position as executive director of the nonprofit Lifecycle WomanCare in Bryn Athyn, Montgomery County, one of the oldest continually operating birth centers in the country.

The state department oversees regulations on nonprofit and for-profit corporations, putting Boockvar again in a position that was directly affected by the agency.

"It's kind of like all of my roads converged at the Department of State," Boockvar said, looking back on her career path so far.

Boockvar didn't set out to become the head of one of the most involved departments of Pennsylvania's government, but it's where she ended up eventually.

Through her various positions over her career, Boockvar's name came back to Gov. Wolf in 2018 through an overlapping network of mutual colleagues.

"I often, when I talk to young folks, like to say, 'Make sure you never have blinders on or think that your life will be a straight path. 

"If I had thought there was a straight path I would have missed so many things throughout the last decade or decade and a half," she added.

Securing an unprecedented election

The coronavirus continues to be top safety concern going into Tuesday's election, but misinformation about election integrity has become a more immediate problem.

Mail-in ballots have gained popularity across the country during the pandemic, and with it have come aspersions by groups and even some officials, including the president, that the ballot process is wrought with potential voter fraud.

Trump's campaign even took the state to federal court challenging the use of ballot drop-boxes or mobile sites to collect ballots earlier this year and other issues, including that of poll watchers in Philadelphia.

"This is a judge who was appointed by President Trump ... and one of the things he directly addressed head-on were these fuzzy claims of voter fraud," Boockvar said this week.

U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan threw out the lawsuit earlier this month, his opinion citing a lack of evidence that drop boxes posed a risk of voter fraud or that removing those boxes would solve the alleged issue.

"If anybody was going to produce (evidence of widespread voter fraud), it would have been (Trump's campaign) because they had every reason in the world to produce it," Boockvar added.

Pennsylvania could very well be the key to victory for either Trump or Joe Biden with its 20 electoral votes at stake and its increasingly purple electorate. 

If anything, Boockvar said, the mail-in ballots and the state's new voting machines make casting a vote in someone else's name very difficult.

Voter fraud is a broad term that can include a number of illegal actions designed to cast votes illegally. 

Boockvar said actual instances of fraud like voter impersonation are extremely rare in Pennsylvania.

Posing as another voter in-person requires a lot of work for very low reward.

Not only would someone have to know the voter they're impersonating hasn't already voted, but they would also have be certain none of the poll workers would recognize them.

Many election volunteers, Boockvar included, help out for years at a single location and often get to know voters in their precincts.

An impersonator might rely on inactive voters listed in the state's voter registration data, available online for a $20 fee, but they would probably have to show identification when they arrive.

Even if an impersonator could successfully cast a vote undetected, it's still just a single vote.

Swaying the outcome of a presidential election would mean a coordinated effort of likely tens of thousands of impersonators, all running the risk of years in jail and hefty fines.

While some states send out mail-in ballots to every voter automatically, Pennsylvania requires voters to apply for a mail-in ballot requiring some form of identification like a drivers license or the last four digits of a voter's Social Security number.

Each voter's ballot is also assigned a unique tracking bar code that will flag any attempts to vote twice for the same person. 

Since the ballots are being mailed, stealing ballots out of mailboxes also adds more federal charges.

"How many levels of felonies do you want to commit to maybe pick up a vote?" Boockvar said.

In addition, Boockvar added, a massive effort to steal an election would require a near complete breakdown of security and confirmation processes between the polling place to the county elections offices where votes are tallied.

She said the claims of voter fraud are used primarily as a fear tactic to undermine the election process.

Over all, Boockvar said voters in Pennsylvania should have "extreme confidence" that their vote will be secure and counted come Election Day.