Former Westmoreland election head lands Centre County post

Former Westmoreland County Election Director Beth Lechman, who resigned three months before the contentious 2020 general election, has been appointed election director in Centre County.

Lechman, who led the Westmoreland elections office for five years, began her new job Monday. Public records show the officials in the county of 165,000 that is home to Penn State University hired Lechman late last month at a salary of $85,000. That’s about $16,000 more than Lechman’s final salary in Westmoreland County, which is more than twice as large as Centre.

She declined to discuss the issues that led her to resign in the midst of an election season rocked with controversy over a new mail-in voting law but said she’s happy in her new post.

“I think it will be a pretty good fit,” Lechman said.

Experienced elections administrators apparently are going for a premium in Pennsylvania, where about two-thirds of the state’s county election administrators have resigned or retired in the past year.

In Westmoreland County, commissioners are battling a federal lawsuit from Lechman’s successor, JoAnn Sebastiani, and overseeing a reorganization of the office even as they seek to fill the director’s post that has been held by an interim appointee since late June.

Sebastiani, 63, of Hempfield, who previously was deputy director of the county tax office, was named election director in August 2020 at a salary of about $53,000 a year. She was suspended from her election bureau post with pay in June and subsequently fired.

Her brief tenure in the Election Bureau saw the dismissal of the office’s deputy director in October, six weeks before a record-setting general election.

There also were staff resignations in the office, as well as complaints about a third-party contractor’s failure to send out mail-in ballots in a timely fashion last fall and errors on some primary ballots.

In her lawsuit filed in August, Sebastiani claimed county commissioners were part of the problem and refused to take responsibility for their role in creating issues before and after the election. She also charged that a secretary for Commissioner Sean Kertes ordered her to change her registration from Democrat to Republican after she was appointed elections director.

Kertes and Commissioners Gina Cerilli Thrasher and Doug Chew, all of whom are defendants in the suit, have declined to comment on it.

Officials in Westmoreland County have said interviews for a new elections director have been conducted, but commissioners have yet to make any announcements.

Thrasher said Westmoreland isn’t the only county that has struggled with filling election bureau positions over the past year.

“We learned at our summer (state county commissioners) conference that 41 of 67 counties will have new election directors after the 2020 election. So, Westmoreland is certainly not alone,” she said.

Tim Mattice, director of the National Association of Election Officials, said there has been significant turnover among local election administrators across the country since the contentious 2020 general election.

“Some of this can be attributed to normal attrition, which happens after every presidential election, and some of it can be attributed to the mis/disinformation that voters were exposed to during and after the November election, which makes an already difficult job for election officials in establishing trust with voters, that much more challenging,” Mattice said. “One also can’t overlook that, in some jurisdictions, election officials and their families received threats of violence.”