Al Schmidt: new reform GOP city commissioner talks about changing Board of Elections [Q&A]

When Al Schmidt first walked into his first elected public office as a new City Commissioner, he said it was like walking into a time machine.

Often criticized for being among the least transparent offices in Philadelphia, the Board of Elections has received an injection of new blood this year, with two new, reform-minded candidates winning seats.

Democrat and former mathematician Stephanie Singer shook the city’s political machine by besting the 36-year entrenched, if damaged, Marge Tartaglione, and then coasting through the general election. Because the city charter mandates one of the three Board of Elections seats be reserved for the minority party, Schmidt was caught in a testy battle with aging incumbent Joe Duda, from a decidedly different Philadelphia Republican Party since his election in 1995.

In the end, Singer and Schmidt, who ran similar campaigns on embracing web transparency and technology innovation for the office, won out, joining incumbent Democrat Anthony Clark.

“In Philadelphia today, the divide is less between the Democrats and Republicans, and more between the machine and the reform candidates,” said Schmidt. “The trouble is that some are good at pretending to be both.”

Not only is the culture of the office one in need of updating, so too is the physical City Hall office space, Schmidt said, noting that it looked “like nothing had changed in decades.”

To be fair, when he first walked into the office on Jan. 3, there were four or five computers there.

“But they never had an internet connection or even word processing software,” said Schmidt, laughing with a degree of incredulity. “They might as well have been poorly performing lamps.”

It shows how much Schmidt and Singer have to do to meet many of their promises.

Another story line exists with Schmidt, who lost a spirited 2009 campaign against City Controller Alan Butkovitz. With a few of the Republican City Council candidates, he represents a divide in the local GOP between an old guard that has focused on a small, if stable, slice of the pie for patronage jobs, and a newer reform movement that hopes to run competitively in citywide elections.

An educated former performance auditor from the federal Government Accountability Office, Schmidt 40, who is married and has two daughters in East Falls, is bright, cheery and prepared. Earlier this month, Pittsburgh-bred Schmidt sat down with Technically Philly to discuss his campaigns and plans for his new office.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

Give us the quick pitch on what your new job is.

The three city commissioners sit on the Board of Elections to decide matters before the election board, from polling place changes to much bigger things. They run the election machinery in the city.

The Board of Elections has roughly 100 full-time civil servant employees and an approximately $10 million budget, with offices in City Hall, at Delaware and Spring Garden and a warehouse in North Philadelphia. So it is an organization and operation that you’re running, and much like agriculture or farming, there is a time when you’re sowing and a time when you’re reaping.

You have two elections every year, a general and primary, whether it is federal or municipal only, so there’s always activity that takes place every year, but sometimes there are different things that occur. There is a voter ID bill being discussed in Harrisburg, that’s something new this year. There is another bill that would change how names appear on the ballot, having them rotate rather than some candidates just getting stuck with a low position. Special elections, we’ll have some of those this year. Those are examples of things that come up that we decide.

There’s no redoing elections. There’s zero room for error. That’s what makes this so critical.

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Remind us of what you campaigned on and why you think it worked.

There were a couple of core principles that we ran on that we thought the office could benefit from.

One was greater transparency in terms of voters and people interested in getting involved in civic life in the city and having access to the information to make the most of it, including people who want to run for office, because it shouldn’t just be someone who is connected to some ward office.

Another element was accountability. There were previous Controller audits and other reports, including from Inquirer and the Daily News, that consistently pointed out its lack of accountability for how it spends its money and its responsiveness.

And to improve efficiency. Elections in Philadelphia cost more than any other county in the state, and it’s more than twice the average of any other county. It costs $10 per voter to run an election in Philadelphia and that’s more like $4 or $5 in the rest of the state.

Sure, but large cities present problems in terms of population and access that can drive up cost.

Well,yes, but it’s high in terms of the amount spent per voter when compared to other big cities too, so something is wrong there. But because [previous commissioners] weren’t transparent about how they spent their money, we don’t know what’s wrong until we’ve come into office. So we have a lot of work to do.

We’ve seen the reform movement in citywide offices happen before, perhaps most famously in the 1950s, so why do you think this resonated now?

My background is in political history — I have a Phd in political history — so you have different types of moments and sometimes they catch fire and sometimes they don’t. For example, there are plenty of things in city government to be outraged about every day and every year, like DROP which really captured people’s attentions and has had a significant impact on the results of elections, and other things are at least as abusive in terms of use of taxpayer dollars, but they never catch people’s interest. So you try to raise awareness of what you can, and see what interests.

I’m obsessed with Richardson Dilworth, Clark and that whole phase: they had been losing for 12 years before they were successful in the face of a Republican Party in this city that had once outnumbered Democrats 12 to one. Now, Democrats outnumber Republicans six or seven to one. I’m not suggesting that any change in the city either with our party or in city government will be easy but you’re certainly not going to succeed if you don’t try.

With a reform Republican breaking into a Democrat/Republican machine commission, the Clark-Dilworth comparisons are inevitable, but the difference, of course, is that whenever we have a seen a big watershed change in registration locally, it has at least nearly mirrored something happening nationally.

The Democrats had the wind at their back and the New Deal was going on, so the migration of African-Americans not only to Philadelphia from the South but also from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party…

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So that changes a lot, but there are some notable people trying to reshape the GOP locally. Can a change really happen locally without a national trend to push it along?

Well, you just don’t know. I don’t want to overdo the Dilworth thing, but it’s not like when Dilworth is starting out that Dilworth knew there would be a New Deal or that African Americans would defect en masse from the Republican Party.

You just don’t know what’s around the corner. Now, there’s no sense whatsoever that there is going to be a change to the city that would be parallel to the Dilworth-Clark era. This is not going to be a Republican city in the foreseeable future. The Republican Party registrations have been declining for years and plummeting years ago. That has caused strife within the local Republican community.

One last politics question, in terms of being a different breed of local GOP candidate in a heavily Democratic city, do you see your role to make your party affiliation more palatable to more progressive voters in Philadelphia or to make party affiliation less important overall by suggesting it’s an outlier?

At least the way I’ve conceptualized it, we want a Republican reform taking place and Democratic reform taking place in the city. The objective is to improve and reform city government. The objective isn’t partisan. If we do the best job we can do, there will be a partisan benefit to it. But if you look at it through a strictly partisan effort, it won’t work.

Singer is in a different party, and I’m sure there are many things we disagree on, but in terms of city government, there are very few things we disagree on it.

There’s the old saying that there’s no Republican or Democrat way to fix a pothole, well, similarly, elections in Philadelphia are either going to be fair or not be fair, it’s not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing or a Green Party thing. Taxpayer dollars are either spent well or they’re not.

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What are you excited about that would interest a technology community?

A lot of the changes are really primitive that still move the agency forward a light year.

Right now, there’s hardly any information available online. Only recently did they put information up on how to register for absentee ballots. Putting up past election results and things like that is primitive stuff but important.

We do look forward to some small innovations like being able to text your address and we can text back the location of a poling place.

When you look at the great work done by the Committee of Seventy, you realize they’ve done it to fill a vacuum left by the city’s commissioners not keeping up with this. Go to Seventy’s website, put in your address and find out where you can vote. It’s not like you have to go to City Hall and look through a big binder to find out where you vote.

They have information on how to run for office, and I think it’s all things the city commissioners should be doing.

What is priority one for you?

There’s one that is immediate and one long term.

The most immediate thing is that we have to propose a budget for our office for city council. There’s very little time. In past, the budget hasn’t been very transparent. We want to do more.

How?

Not just how much you have to spend, but on what.

A budget can be five line items, with $1 million for this and $3 million for that, or you can break that down more. I think City Council deserves that and we should do that.

And what’s the longer term goal?

My background is as a performance auditor. We can find ways to find efficiencies to save money and improve services. I’d like to lead a way to evaluate the entire office. There are many civil servants there who work very hard and know what they’re doing, but I suspect there are ways to further improve services and save money.

I think it’s foolish to just rush in and make changes.

Just because you win an election, doesn’t mean you’re right and know everything about how to improve performance.

So taking a little more deliberate approach to do the changes right is what that performance evaluation will be intended to assist with.

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How would you judge success at the end of your term?

One thing we did from the start after election was form a a transition committee and one of their responsibilities was to assemble our commitments during our campaign, so now it’s important to look to those as a touchstone for as much as warranted for delivering on what we promised. Some may be impractical, but I doubt it and believe we’ll be able to follow through.

Two new faces on a three person panel, and Commissioner Clark wasn’t exactly out campaigning, so I doubt you know each other well. Will the three of you go out and get beers?

[laughs] Well, the Sunshine laws prohibit us from discussing business privately, but we can get together to discuss the Eagles but nothing before the commission.

What was the relationship between the commissioners in the past?

Marge Tartaglione made decisions and two other commissioners placed temporary employees, since the board hires a significant number of temporary employees before and during elections.

Is there water cooler talk in your offices?

It’s not like the City Council can go around and talk about issues, it’d be in violation of Sunshine Laws. though that seems difficult, it is in place for a good reason, to ensure transparency. Small matters like internal office needs can happen in executive session, but otherwise, we don’t talk about high-level matters.

….We’re going to do good work, and the voters will be able to know about it.