Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
Secretary of State Kim Wyman in front of the Washington State Capitol in Olympia
As if their jobs weren’t contentious enough, election officials across the country are figuring out how to hold this year’s general election during a pandemic. One tool that many states will be expanding—over the objections of President Trump—is voting by mail, sometimes called absentee voting. Currently, each state has its own distinct level of access to mail-in ballots.
One state often singled out for its preparedness is Washington, which has a universal vote-by-mail system. It started expanding its mail-in system in 1993.
Recently, Washington’s Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman talked with the Prospect about how her state is preparing for this year’s elections, how to ensure fair and accurate results, and what keeps Wyman up at night even though her state’s election system is already better prepared than most.
Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Brittany Gibson: Washington already has a well-established vote-by-mail system. Do you feel like you’re well prepared or at least better prepared than some other states right now?
Kim Wyman: I think we’re in a very good position compared to other states because we’ve been a [universal] vote-by-mail state since 2011 and now we have a rich history of doing it. It took us five years to become vote-by-mail even when we wanted to, from polling-place elections, and having a lot of years of doing expanded absentee and permanent absentee status for our voters.
But what I definitely have figured out in the last month is COVID-19 is affecting every type of voting system and it doesn’t matter how your voters cast a ballot—because we’re being impacted on the workforce side. We still have a very large workforce that we employ in the days before and after the election, and I would say half to two-thirds of that workforce, like in every other state in the country, is in the 65-and-over age group. So right now, among the many other things that we’re trying to retool for COVID-19, just having the people that we’re going to need to process ballots is going to be a challenge.
BG: Is there a different way that you’ll be approaching staffing considering you’re trying to hire some younger, probably first-time poll workers, as opposed to your regular 65-plus, who have multiple elections under their belts?
KW: I think one the first logistic challenges is you really lose your people who have worked three or four elections, or maybe two presidential-election cycles, [who] really understand the mechanics of how your ballot processing operations go. I imagine the counties are first prioritizing those positions and trying to figure out how they’re going to recruit for those.
We actually want to spin up some sort of partnership between businesses and nonprofits in our state to help with the recruitment effort … We cannot risk people not believing the results in November. You may not like the outcome, but you need to believe that the election is well run. And we’re going to need a lot of people to make that happen.
BG: Could you explain how the U.S. Postal Service works with Washington to execute these elections?
KW: Absolutely. We’ve had a long-standing, close relationship with our Postal Service—postmasters at the local level and then just the plant managers in the bigger counties. It’s decades in the making. It started in the mid-1990s, when Washington was really expanding out our permanent absentee voters and you need to do things like design your envelopes so that you can get the lowest postal rate possible and take advantage of the mailing postal rates to reduce the mailing costs. I know they’re working on having that bar code that the post office has us put on our ballots so voters can be able to track it, so they can see when their ballot enters the mail stream and when it’s delivered to their house, back in the mail stream until the county is ready to count it. Those are the kinds of things that all of these states are looking at: You want to build in this security so when people make allegations that vote-by-mail is fraudulent, you can make sure the security measures are in place. And we’ve worked very closely with the post office for years to make sure that that happens.
If a voter says something’s wrong or they didn’t get their ballot, we’re also very quick to communicate with postal workers. And they can check their systems. And there have been numerous elections where you can find trays of ballots or pallets of ballots that are sitting on a loading dock before people realize that they’re there. And you want to make sure you do that well in advance of Election Day, so you can make sure that all of those voters have a chance to vote.
BG: What does it do to your planning right now to hear stories that the Postal Service could run out of money by September? They might be at a weakened capacity by the time November rolls around and you want them to continue this partnership for the next general election.
KW: Absolutely. And that’s why I joined some of my colleagues, [Secretary of State] Jim Condos from Vermont, in fact, to have that conversation. We did a press conference a couple of weeks ago. And Congress does truly need to provide the loan or the funding from the Postal Service because so many ballots are going to go through the Postal Service over the next six months, that it has to be a trusted delivery system. In 2016, I think 33 million ballots nationwide were cast absentee or in vote-by-mail systems and I would anticipate—since you have so many voters who are over 65, just that group alone—you’re going to see probably a doubling of absentee ballots nationwide, at least. The Postal Service has to be able to deal with that. And for them, that’s not a big number—considering the number and the volume that the Postal Service deals with on a daily basis, we’re kind of small potatoes. But if they can’t function in the normal way, providing service Monday through Saturday, and picking up mailbox delivery, that’s going to be a real problem. We can’t afford to have that happen.
BG: Is there any other private company or entity that could do for you and your state what the USPS does?
KW: Not really. You could have UPS or FedEx cover some of those deliveries, but the challenge is that the post office delivers to post office boxes. Those private companies don’t deliver to post office boxes. So out of the gate, you have a wide swath of our voters that we wouldn’t be able to get a ballot to because they use mailing addresses that are post office boxes. Also, rural delivery isn’t always covered by those private carriers. And our state has a very good mix of dense urban cities and some pretty big, remote, rural areas that I would be concerned wouldn’t be able to be served in the same way that the USPS can. So it is something that we depend on, we’ve built our system on, and it needs to be supported because many more states are going to be expanding that out in the coming months.
BG: In your letter requesting almost $9 million under the Help America Vote Act that Congress approved last December, you said that Washington would use this money for election security. Can you describe what security improvements look like? What does it mean to improve the security of Washington’s elections?
KW: There actually have been two rounds of Help America Vote Act money. For the first round, we used that money at a statewide level. We had just built out a statewide voter registration system and election management system, called VoteWA, in partnership with our 39 counties. We used that round of money to enhance our firewalls, to build up a security operations center. The second round of money that you’re talking about we’re getting ready to distribute to our counties, so we first had our security operations center go out and do a security assessment of not only the cybersecurity side of their systems but more the physical security. Some of our county courthouses are very old and antiquated, and some of them aren’t even accessible. And so our cyber team went in and looked at the physical security. You know, how do you secure your vote tabulation systems? Is it connected to the internet? Does it have Wi-Fi connection?
They did this assessment and then we got those reviews back. Now we’re making recommendations to the counties, like, all of your staff should be using multifactor identification on all of your activities, not just when you’re logging in to the statewide registration system. In some physical-security matters, creating a door with a lock that has key-card access for employees only and keeps an electronic log of who goes in and out of your electronic tabulation room. Or putting in cameras to observe the ballot processing. So you can just put a live feed on the website and people can watch 24/7 if they want. It’s like watching grass grow, but you know, you can watch ballot processing.
So we’re either directly increasing the security or increasing the transparency of the secure environment we work in.
And then we’re using the CARES Act money, that we’re just getting ready to distribute now. That’s going to be focused on COVID-19 mitigation.
BG: Is there any other area of running elections that still worries you in the new normal, the COVID-19 era?
KW: You look at the cyber threats, the threat of foreign interference on social media, COVID-19—those are all worrisome, but I think that thing that keeps me up at night is that partisanship is one of the greatest threats to our elections this year. Coming out of 2016 and the four years since, there’s been a partisan divide that we haven’t seen in a long time. I think it probably goes back to 2010, following President Obama taking office and the Tea Party movement. [The] Pew [Research Center] has done a lot of research on this, where you’re seeing that moderate middle is going away.
Those absolutes start to make people doubt that our elections are impartially conducted by 10,000 independently elected and appointed officials who swear an oath to uphold the constitution and the laws in their state, and the U.S. Constitution. The public has to believe that the winner won legitimately because if they don’t believe the election results were fair and accurate then they don’t believe that whoever won actually won. And I think that’s the big takeaway from 2016. Think about the emotion, the emotion in the last four years and certainly after that election, no one saw it coming. No one expected Donald Trump to win, and when he won, for one side it was elation and jubilation and for the other side it was anger and frustration. Why didn’t we see anarchy? Why didn’t we see people filling the streets wanting to overthrow the government? It’s because at a foundational level, people said, “Well, I don’t like the outcome. But the election was fair. He lost the national popular vote, but he did win the Electoral College, and that’s the system we have in place. So I’m going to accept that he won the election.”
We don’t have that going into 2020. People are already looking at everything on the election administration side with a microscopic view of, are you closing this polling place to disproportionately affect this voting bloc? Or are you trying to send everyone an absentee ballot to help the Democratic Party?
BG: That leads me to my last question, which is: You are a Republican in a state with universal vote-by-mail. You’ve won election twice within that system. And yet the highest-ranking Republican, President Trump, has repeatedly connected vote-by-mail—not even a universal system, just vote-by-mail—to fraud. And he’s sowing this kind of fear that you just talked about, fear in not being able to believe the results. Yet you’re writing op-eds with Democratic counterparts, other secretaries of state; you’re talking to me about vote-by-mail. Is this part of your role in being transparent so people have faith in the elections? How should people reconcile those two things?
KW: I think some of it goes back to the fact that I started in elections 27 years ago. And I started as an election director, so I wasn’t elected partisanly. And a lesson I learned when I wanted to go up to the next level and become a county auditor, which I did in 2001, is I had close friends who didn’t know I was a Republican. And I had to run for office as a partisan. And the takeaway, though, is for nine years almost, I had close friends who didn’t know my party affiliation and did know I was doing my job well. It’s powerful that people think you’re being fair. And that’s how I’ve always chosen to approach this job, both at the county level and at the statewide level. Now more than ever, that’s what’s important. While I am an elected Republican, and I certainly run for office in a partisan environment and have to navigate that, when I walk in the door every day I have to operate in a nonpartisan manner.
I had the curse, or I guess blessing, of being in the county when we had the closest governor’s race in the country in 2004. And when you go through that microscopic overview of every single policy and procedure that you administer, you have a different perspective on the importance of instilling confidence in voters.
