From November 3^rd to January 6^th last year, election officials across the country defended the results of the election amid harassment and threats from former President Trump and his allies. Former Philadelphia City Commissioner AL SCHMIDT, the lone Republican on the city’s election board, received death threats, some even targeting his three young daughters. Today, Schmidt will reflect on that difficult time and the challenges facing our future elections and democracy as we know it. Then, author MARK BOWDEN will lay out the week-by-week effort in key battleground states to undo the 2020 election results. His new book, co-authored with Matthew Teague, is The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It.

Guests

Al Schmidt, President and CEO of Committee of Seventy, former Philadelphia City Commissioner

Mark Bowden,  contributor to The Atlantic and author of The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It

Recommended reading

Philadelphia Inquirer, covid-new-year-2022-20220102.html">After a failed insurrection and amid an ongoing plague, a fight for democracy’s future – “Well into the night, after the Capitol had been cleared, when Congress voted to certify the Electoral College vote,trump-impeach-remove-25th-amendment-pennsylvania-gop-resign-20210107.html"> eight of the nine Pennsylvania Republicans in Congress still voted to overturn the election.”

Reuters, Threatened US election workers get little protection from law enforcement as terror threats mount – “Over the next month, Schmidt received multiple death threats…Some targeted his wife or threatened his children by name. One threat included a photo of his house taken from a real-estate website and said his family “will be fatally shot.”

The Guardian, The Steal review: A stethoscope for a democracy very close to cardiac arrest – “The “real insurrection” was the one “led by Trump and his coterie of sycophants” in Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. It “was only slightly better organized than the mob but considerably more calculated and dangerous.”