Beth Lechman knows there will be lots of eyeballs scrutinizing her work in this high-stakes presidential election year, and that’s OK with her.
Lechman, Centre County’s elections director since September 2021, is busy with her staff preparing for the April 23 party primaries and the Nov. 5 general election.
Previously doing their jobs largely in obscurity, election officials nationwide have landed increasingly in the spotlight in the wake of the contested 2020 presidential vote, although no evidence of widespread fraud was found.
“Yes, having that many people looking at you under the microscope has added a little bit more of a challenge,” Lechman says. “But I think most election directors welcome that because if people see that you’re doing it properly, there’s less questions that can be asked.”
A degree in information systems helped lead Lechman to a career helping to oversee elections. She was part of the IT team trained on new voting systems in Westmoreland County, and, in 2007, became that county’s assistant elections director. She then served as director there from 2016 to summer 2020.
Her team in Centre County includes four full-time staffers, one part-timer, and a small corps of temporary staffers in the weeks surrounding an election. On Election Day, an average of six to eight people work each of the county’s 87 polling locations. Another 60 to 100 people help at the vote-by-mail centers at the Penn Stater and in the county’s Willowbank Building. Those mail-in votes are tabulated under the lenses of C-NET cameras that livestream the count on YouTube.
Residents can find the video feeds—and a trove of information including polling places, how to vote by mail, sample ballots and voting statistics—on the county’s elections page, centrecountyvotes.gov.
The best part of the job for Lechman?
“Assisting voters, making sure everyone gets the right to vote,” she says. “To me, it’s kind of a sense of community because you’re helping a large portion of your community do an action that I hope most people take very seriously.”
Here’s more from our conversation:
Has the national controversy that surrounded the 2020 election changed your job and the jobs of the other people who administer the election here?
Lechman: We still do the same processes that we’ve always done. They’re just a little bit more in the limelight. We have more public interest, which is fine with our office. It’s nothing different than we’ve done prior. We still have all the same checks and balances.
Have you encountered many skeptics, people who don’t trust that what you’re doing here is honest?
Lechman: Right after the 2020 election and in 2021 when I came into Centre County, there were quite a few constituents—voters—that would come to the meetings and ask lots of questions. But I feel that they’ve gotten their questions answered and believe in the process a little more. We’ve had a lot of those voters work at our vote-by-mail center, watch the process and get involved. And that helps.
Has the increased scrutiny that election officials are under made it more difficult to recruit people to work the polls?
Lechman: In Centre County, we’re very fortunate. We’ve had these poll workers that have worked for us for years; we have a pretty steady group of people. And we have asked for some more persons to work in our office; we’ve been able to recruit those staff as well. People still want to get involved in helping the process. But yes, across the country, across the state, it has put a lot more pressure on the election officials. Some counties are feeling more pressure than others.
This is your first time overseeing a presidential election in Centre County. Is this different than a municipal or state election in terms of what’s involved for you?
Lechman: The biggest thing that’s different for our office is the volume. Every election to us is treated the same; we still need to procure our polling locations, we still need our poll workers, we still need to do all the ballot prep, and all the equipment, taking care of all of those things. It’s just the sheer volume that comes in. Usually in a municipal election, your average turnout was about 30%, while in a presidential election, it’s 70 or 80%.
Aside from technology, what are the most important things that have changed over the years you’ve been doing this in how elections are administered?
Lechman: The biggest change would have been in 2020 when we went to mail ballots that allowed more voters to vote through that method. In the past, it had only been certain voters that qualified for a ballot through the mail. They had to be either disabled, could not make it to their polling location for various reasons, and then they had to list those reasons on their application. … And [the change] actually increased the percentage voter turnout [from 63% in 2016 to nearly 70% in 2020 in Centre County].
You can start opening the mail-in ballots at 8 a.m. on Election Day. You begin counting that morning, and it just continues until the process is done?
Lechman: Yes, we did make one change last election, that we had a counting center here at the Willowbank Building, as well as at the Penn Stater. … So that helped us get all of our ballots counted, and we were finished by nine o’clock [at night]. That’s something that we plan on doing again this election. I don’t anticipate we’ll be done that early, especially if voters wait to the last minute to bring them into the office. But we’re going to continue that process so we can get that completed faster.
Is there anything that the state could do to make this process smoother?
Lechman: The one thing that most election directors have been asking for is pre-canvassing of ballots; we would be able to start opening and counting those ballots the weekend before, or a few days before the election, so that process would be finished.
When you wake up on November 6, the day after the election—or whenever the counting has been completed and you’ve submitted everything you need to submit—what would make you feel good?
Lechman: This presidential election, I don’t know what to expect after. I wouldn’t have expected anything that happened after the 2020 election to happen. So, I don’t want to anticipate feeling comfortable after the election, because you just don’t know. With the legalities of things, people contesting things, you just don’t know.
What would make you proud after this election is wrapped up?
Lechman: Having minimal issues on Election Day; all the voters getting their right to vote, feeling confident that Centre County has processed the ballots appropriately, and everybody’s ballot counted. That’s a sense of pride and accomplishment. We always used to tease that we called it “election in a box.” After we certified everything and the election was packed away, then you could breathe easy, because it was in the box and ready to be stored. And the questions were answered.
Is there anything else you want voters to know about how your office does its work?
Lechman: I think the biggest thing is the way that we count the ballots and verify the ballots from the polling locations on Election Day. After the fact on Thursday, we start what’s called the canvass process. We go down through those numbered lists of voter books that they sign in, the poll books. The ballots, the count from the voting equipment and the general return sheets that the poll workers themselves complete and verify that, OK, in our system there’s 100 voters in your precinct; 50 of those voters signed in to vote, you had this many spoiled ballots, this is your ballot total. We’ve always gone through and done that check and balance. You don’t have 200 people voting in a precinct where there’s only 100 registered voters. That doesn’t happen. T&G
Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.
