In an exclusive interview with the Triangle, on Monday, Oct. 28, City Commissioner Seth Bluestein covered the importance of voting and security of elections in Philadelphia.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sophia Mattia: Can you tell me a little bit about who you are and your job as a City Commissioner?
Seth Bluestein: My name is Seth Bluestein. I am one of the three City Commissioners. We are elected officials in the city who form the bipartisan Board of Elections. I served for 10 years as Deputy Commissioner for now-Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, and I became commissioner approximately three years ago.
It’s our job to run all the voter registration and elections for the entire city. We have nearly 1.1 million registered voters. It’s our job to help them get registered and set up the polling places, program the voting machines, train the poll workers and also count all the ballots after the election and certify the results.
SM: Have you seen an increase in voter registration in Philadelphia this election overall or within a particular age demographic?
SB: It’s pretty typical to see an increase in voter registration activity before a big election like a presidential general election. The registration numbers have definitely gone up. I haven’t seen any particular trends with age demographics necessarily. But, I have noticed that most of those new registrants have actually chosen to register as non-affiliated. Both major parties have increased their numbers as well, but the percentage of new registrants who are choosing to be non-affiliated with either party is noteworthy.
SM: Can you explain the process of how votes are counted in Philadelphia and how you make sure elections stay fair when there are different factors that can corrupt votes? In the last presidential election, former President Trump claimed “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and the news of 2500 alleged fraudulent voter registration applications in Lancaster County this election season was reported by NBC News on Friday, Oct. 25.
SB: I’ll start with the ways people can vote. We have in-person voting at polling places and also vote by mail. In 2019, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law called Act 77 which allowed Pennsylvania for the first time to have no excuse to vote by mail. We now have hundreds of thousands of voters voting by mail in advance of the election — whether they request that ballot through the mail or they come to one of our satellite election offices to request a ballot. Most of the voters will actually vote on Election Day. At the polling place, many of them, almost all of them, will vote on a voting machine. We have a full team of employees at our warehouse who program those voting machines.
If you go to a polling place, and for some reason they can’t find you in the poll book, or you go to the wrong location, you can vote a provisional ballot, which is a paper ballot at the polling place. At the end of the night, all of those ballots, whether they’re mail ballots, the voting machine results, or provisional ballots, they come back to our warehouse to get counted.
When it comes to the security of that voting process, there’s a number of ways that we address that. For the voting machines in particular, we do logic and accuracy testing prior to Election Day. That is how we can test to make sure the voting machines are accurately reading the results. After the election, for all of the ballots, whether it’s a mail ballot, or in-person vote, we do two audits after each election. We can have complete confidence in the accuracy of those results.
The other thing you asked about was the alleged voter registration fraud in Lancaster County. We know that during presidential elections in particular there will be lots of groups that go around and collect registrations and sometimes those registrations are not completely filled out or accurately filled out. It is something that we look for, just like they did in Lancaster County, and if we find any obviously incomplete or fraudulent applications, we would reject those and if we notice any patterns of potential irregularities, we would forward those to the proper authorities to be looked into.
SM: Since you became commissioner in 2022, has the voting process changed at all?
SB: One of the things we added since I became commissioner was electronic poll books. Prior to implementing electronic poll books, when you would go sign in at the polling place you would sign in on a paper poll book. The electronic poll books make the check-in process much more efficient and they also help voters find their correct polling place if they go to the wrong one. That’s the major technological upgrade we’ve completed since I became commissioner.
One of the other major programs that we implemented was my proposal to expand language access. By federal law, we are required to provide voting in English, Spanish and Chinese in Philadelphia. There are a lot of registered voters in the city who speak a language other than one of those three languages. We have implemented a program to expand access for an additional six languages [Khmer, Korean, Polish, Russian and Vietnamese].
SM: Can you explain the importance of voting for people who may feel like their vote doesn’t have an impact?
SB: Voting is the most fundamental component to our democratic system of government. Without participating in voting, people don’t have a say in who is governing them and what their representatives are doing. It’s not even about who you vote for necessarily, but participating in the process alone is so important. It increases the amount of resources that come back to the city and elected officials, when they’re running for reelection, they’re going to pay attention to the constituencies who are more likely to come out and vote. It’s an essential part of participating.
I’ll give you an example of how important even one vote can be. A number of years ago, there was a race for a City Commissioner position in Abington Township in the suburbs, and that race ended in an actual tie. The winner of that seat was decided by the flip of a coin, rather than by the voters who chose not to turn out. All the legal processes when you review all the ballots, if the election is certified to be a tie, they have to break that tie somehow.
SM: Since we are based at Drexel University, do you have a message for college students who are voting in this election?
SB: We have made voting in Philadelphia as accessible as possible, especially for students who can register to vote in Philadelphia and participate where they go to school. We have polling places on campus. If you requested a mail ballot and you need any assistance, we have one of our satellite election offices right at 40th and Market. There’s really no excuse to not participate in this upcoming election and if you need any assistance our office is always here to help you.
SM: What are some key issues that you think that voters should be paying attention to this election season?
SB: Since our job is to run the elections, we don’t get too much into specific policy issues or things that voters should be focusing on, but the one aspect I will comment on is, voters should absolutely take a look at every candidate’s record on matters of democracy and voting. That is unfortunately, since 2020, a major policy issue that needs to be thought about and I think that every voter should look at a candidate’s record on whether or not they will accept the results of the election if they lose, prior to going to vote.
For more information on voting resources, visit vote.phila.gov.