investigation to city, state, and federal law enforcement. our election operations were centered in the pennsylvania convention center in center city, philadelphia, and there was one tv on that i happened to be walking past. and the president saying, why are they still counting? we already got the results. we re winning pennsylvania by a tremendous amount of votes. i want to be very clear about what then president trump was calling for. he wanted millions of americans to be disenfranchised. which is completely at odds with democracy. it was pretty upsetting to see that. let s get a key race alert in some of the battleground states. when half your voters, in our case 325,000 voters, vote by mail, it takes days to count all those ballots because you can t even begin processing the envelopes they came in until 7:00 on election morning. because that s the law that the republicans made. that is the law the republicans made and refused to change.
part of fox news s 2020 decision desk. the question is do republicans do well enough on election day to offset it? in 2020, the divide was expected to be more pronounced than usual because trump had been telling republicans not to trust mail-in ballots. this set the stage for what experts predicted would prompt misleading early vote counts. there may be what some folks call a red mirage, so that trump s numbers may be highest on election night, and then there s a long tail called the blue wave as more votes, absentees come in that in the last couple of decades have come in overwhelmingly democrat. the big caveat is we ve never had early voting like this. we all knew that some states were going to show him up and then it was going to get closer. did he not know that? no, he had been told that repeatedly and he didn t care. he had decided before the summer, frankly, when it was clear that the pandemic was going to change the way by mail voting worked in a number of states and e
their political fortunes ahead of doing their duty. and so i think that, you know, in some instances there is fear, physical fear about what trump would do or the threats that might come, but in other cases i think it s it s a political calculation, which is pretty craven if you think about it. what is the danger do you think of elected officials who might know better acquiescing to these demands, to these requests or winking and nodding about the big lie? the danger is that once you do it on this issue, what s to why wouldn t you do it on any other issue? this is not about right and left at all. it s about right and wrong. the institutions don t hold themselves. in the moments of truth you need the right people to pass the most difficult tests. we had just enough people on january 6th pass the test.
that suggests to me that you were worried. i was. it is such a basic fundamental thing. every president really is responsible for safeguarding the peaceful transfer of power. we re going to have to see what happens. and so for president trump not to be willing to make that commitment was stunning. reporter: that was september of 2020 when donald trump also stunned republican al schmidt. we either need to get them on board or move the polling place. reporter: at the time schmidt was one of three city commissioners in philadelphia. his job was to oversee the city s elections. it was a big problem. in philadelphia they went in to watch. they were called poll watchers. they were thrown out. they weren t allowed to watch. you know why? because bad things happen in philadelphia. bad things. so you re watching the debate and president trump says bad things happen in philadelphia. what goes through your mind? i think i said out loud, i see what you re doing. we had the sitt