EDITORIAL: Clearer vision for voting with settlement

Aug. 26—About 110 years ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants," which certainly is true of government corruption if not in the biological sense.

Now, Pennsylvanians soon will learn whether sunlight has a disinfecting effect on bogus vote-fraud claims, disinformation about election processes, conspiracy theories about supposedly "rigged" voting devices and other aspects of modern elections.

The state Department of State has settled a lawsuit brought by a coalition of election-security advocacy groups, by requiring all 67 counties to publicly report voting machine malfunctions.

The settlement also requires election administrators to give members of the public better opportunities to observe examinations of voting equipment. It requires Philadelphia, Northampton and Cumberland counties to upgrade their touch-screen voting systems with the most up-to-date software.

According to Ben-Zion Plashnik, president of the nonpartisan National Election Defense Council and a party to the settlement, it serves "voters and ... election officials who wish to protect ... the transparency and the credibility of election results. It allows future elections to be safer from manipulations, and inoculates election technology from those wishing to undermine the credibility of our democratic institutions."

Al Schmidt, the Pennsylvania secretary of state, has substantial experience with irresponsible people attempting to undermine the credibility of our democratic institutions. A Republican, he was Philadelphia's election commissioner for the 2020 election. He'll be responsible for collecting county machine malfunction reports within 60 days after the election and ensuring that they appear on the Department of State website within 45 days after that.

Schmidt also will have to be prepared to respond when those who want to sow doubt about election integrity use the public data perversely to claim fraud.

That risk is worth taking for greater transparency. As Kevin Skoglund, a spokesman for the election security groups, put it: "What gets measured gets managed, and we want to have the ability to measure ... I don't think you can stop people from using good information for bad purposes, and I don't think that's a reason not to do quality control."

The new protocol is the first of its kind nationwide, and a major step in ensuring election security and public confidence in it.