Controversy dissipates after bitter election cycle, but still legal work to be done, Dickinson College president says

President-elect Donald Trump's decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris brought an end to a campaign cycle filled with controversies over election integrity and fears of political violence.

John Jones III, a former federal judge who dealt with Republican election challenges in Pennsylvania in 2020 and is president of Dickinson College in Carlisle, had been preparing for a controversial post-election period as part of Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that had spent months analyzing potential election issues in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The Associated Press called all three states for Trump within days of the election.

"That came as a surprise, but elections are full of surprises, and it's not the first time I've been surprised by a result," he said.

Jones credited Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt and the elections officials from Pennsylvania's 67 counties for ensuring that the election process was "largely uneventful" and that there were no pronounced instances of violence. Schmidt had held a bevy of election security-related briefings of his own ahead of Nov. 5 and traveled the state to speak with voters to build confidence in the process.

Like most other states, Pennsylvania did experience minor issues last Tuesday. Cambria County had to extend its voting hours due to a software malfunction that affected its electronic voting systems.

The state also dealt with bomb threats at several election sites, including one at Centre County's mail-in ballot counting facility that led to a brief evacuation. The FBI said in a statement that the threats were not credible and many of them originated from Russian email domains, in line with government warnings before the election that bad actors like China, Russia and Iran would attempt to cause chaos.

In a high-stakes race, every potential threat has to be investigated no matter if it appears to be a hoax, Jones said.

"They were kind of aberrations in an otherwise pretty sound election," he said.

Domestically, Republicans had been hinting that they would contest the election before last Tuesday's results. Trump said in an interview earlier this year that he would not accept the result unless "everything's honest," and House Speaker Mike Johnson would not commit to certifying a Democratic victory.

Republicans began to lay legal groundwork in swing states as the election drew closer. In October, six House Republicans from Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit seeking to set aside the state's military and overseas ballots, which Jones believed was an attempt at voter suppression similar to GOP efforts he dealt with as a judge in 2020.

The afternoon of the election, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to accuse Democratic strongholds such as Philadelphia and Detroit of improper activities.

"A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia," he wrote. "Law Enforcement coming!!!"

Unlike Trump in 2020, who encouraged his supporters to contest his loss to Joe Biden, Harris conceded without incident and congratulated the president-elect on his victory.

As such, election-related threats have largely dissipated on their own in the past week and the nation's democratic institutions were not seriously tested. Jones said that election officials' vigilance has become "embedded behavior" after the last several cycles, and he was not concerned about their ability to handle any future disruptions and controversy.

"I think people learned a lot in 2020 and 2022, and I think that we will see the same resources being deployed and the same methodology being used to conduct these elections," he said.

Going forward, Pennsylvania lawmakers should be focused on creating statewide policies to establish standards for drop boxes, ballot curing and unsigned mail-in ballots when they convene in early 2025, Jones said.

Many of the state's counties have their own sets of rules when it comes to each of these practices, which led to many of the legal challenges before the election, he said.

"I find it lamentable that the General Assembly can't come to closure on some uniformity," he said. "We know that these things trigger not just litigation, but also foment distrust in the election by people who are prone to think that elections are rigged."

Some election-related lawsuits, like the Republicans' overseas voting challenge, were dismissed by Pennsylvania courts not because of their arguments, but because they were filed too close to Nov. 5, Jones said. This means that they could resurface in the near future and potentially affect the midterm elections in 2026, he said.

Another lawsuit that could resurface would involve changing Act 77, the General Assembly's bipartisan 2019 bill that established statewide mail-in voting.

Act 77 requires voters to properly sign and date the envelope of their mail-in ballot. This year, the American Civil Liberties Union and others sought to overturn the requirement, arguing that tens of thousands of otherwise valid ballots were being disqualified for a procedural error.

The suit was dismissed by the state Supreme Court for only including two counties instead of all 67 and then was dismissed a second time for being filed too close to the election.

"I don't think the General Assembly is going to remove the dating requirement on the outer envelope, but I think there'll be a renewal of a court challenge under the Pennsylvania Constitution, which may prevail," Jones said. "As we say in the law, the court never got to the merits of the claim."

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