Is al schmidt gay
Sec. Al Schmidt is looking for Pennsylvanians to work the polls
Pennsylvania is constantly looking for poll workers to facilitate administer the upcoming primary and general elections. The commonwealth needs 45,000 poll workers for its 9,000 polling locations.
Pennsylvania Secretary of Express Al Schmidt visited Harrisburg’s East Shore Area Library with local election directors and poll workers as part of the nationwide Aid America Vote Morning, and recruit residents to sign up and serve as poll workers for Pennsylvania’s primary and general elections.
“On Election Day, the most important people, it’s not the Secretary of State, it is not your county commissioner, it’s not even your county election director,” Schmidt said at a press conference on Tuesday.
“It’s the men and women who volunteer for essentially a 14-hour day to construct sure that you can cast your vote and hold your vote counted. And that’s really what we’re here to celebrate on Help America Vote Day. Poll workers are really the front lines of our representative democracy. If not for them, we would not be capable to have our votes cast and have our votes counted.”
Schmidt was at the Harrisburg ar
Election Officials Under Attack
How to Protect Administrators
Jun 16, 2021
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Al Schmidt, the Republican capital commissioner of Philadelphia, might seem an unlikely lightning rod for the 2020 election. The married father of three, described by local media as a “bespectacled” bureaucrat, is one of three commissioners responsible for overseeing election-related affairs for the town. A decades-long Republican, he prided himself on bringing transparency to Philadelphia’s election processes.
Threats against Schmidt and his board of elections colleagues began before Election Day, November 3, 2020. About a week prior, someone left an ominous phone message stating that the board members were “the reason why we have the Second Amendment.” Shortly after that, police arrested two men in Philadelphia “after receiving an FBI tip that they were making threats against the Pennsylvania Convention Center,” where ballots were being counted. The men were armed with “two loaded semi-automatic Beretta pistols, one semi-automatic AR-15-style rifle, and ammunition” at the moment of the arrest.
In the days after Pennsylvania was called for Joe Biden,
Despite being one of the most LGBTQ-friendly cities in the region, Philadelphia has never had an openly LGBTQ person elected to City Council. In the second part of this series on local LGBTQ candidates, PGN looked at the campaigns of LGBTQ candidates running for Council and for City Controller.
Rue Landau, running for City Council at large
Landau is a lawyer with a deep history of activism in Philadelphia. After kicking off her career fighting for affordable housing and social services in the early years of the HIV epidemic, she spent over a decade as an attorney at Community Legal Services.
As director of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations and the Fair Housing Commission, Landau played a key role in rolling out a comprehensive ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in Philadelphia. Most recently, she worked as director of law and policy for the Philadelphia Bar Association and was on the faculty of Temple University School of Law.
Landau is focusing her campaign on addressing what she considers the most urgent issues: public safety, long-term disinvestment in Philly’s neighborhoods, and the housing crisis
I was paralyzed in 2016, a month after covering the Democratic National Convention.
It was devastating. I had been living with MS for 30 years, so disability was not novel to me. But with the MS I still had some use of my legs and could walk short distances with a cane. The paralysis — sudden and swift — shattered my existence and ended my autonomy for even the smallest things.
It also meant even if I were adequately enough (I wasn’t), I could no longer vote at my local polling place, which is notoriously inaccessible. In November 2016, I had to vote for the first lady president by absentee ballot. Not my choice, and ridiculously complicated, but at least I could vote.
I faced the same process for the May primary: a process that penalizes disabled people and smacks of voter suppression.
As the governor’s website explains, Pennsylvanians can: “Submit an absentee ballot request form (by mail or in person) or download an application form from votesPA.com/absenteeballot, [then] sending a letter to the county board of elections in the county in which you are registered.”
Who’s doing any of that?
I was. But who else?
I don’t know the numbers on absentee ballots in Philadelphia, but I d