With elections officials from other vote-by-mail states, she appeared in a video on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission website to provide nuts-and-bolts advice on everything from equipment recommendations, working with the United States Postal Service, designing the physical layout of elections facilities for efficiency, and underscoring the importance of putting consistent processes into practice across all counties in a state.
To questions about whether mail voting leads to more fraud, she responded, “I am confident that the answer is no.”
Wyman touts her state’s chain-of-custody safeguards for every ballot, the special systems in place to prevent computer hacking and ensure voter list integrity, and the practice of having human reviewers match voter signatures on file.
And for those who worry about expanded turnout favoring Democratic candidates, Wyman points to cases from Ohio to Utah to California to show that vote-by-mail doesn’t have a meaningful impact one way or the other on the outcomes of partisan elections.
The Washington chapter of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters has worked with Wyman and state legislators in the introduction of several bills in the Washington State Legislature pertaining to voter access and election security.
Kathy Sakahara, LWV/Washington’s chair on elections, voting rights, and campaign finance, ticks off a long list of successes. In 2018, the Washington State Legislature passed, and Governor Jay Inslee signed into law, the Access to Democracy package of bills, which included automatic registration, same-day voter registration, pre-registration for 16 and 17 year olds, and the DISCLOSE Act, which was a nation-leading transparency effort to ensure campaign finance disclosure.
But Kirstin Mueller, chair of LWV/Washington’s Election Security Committee, says there are a few remaining concerns.
While Washington State mandates post-election audits, county auditors are allowed a choice of four different types of audits. If Mueller had her druthers, she’d like to see all of them conducting the most rigorous type of audit, called a risk-limiting audit. But currently, “nobody’s doing it.”
Also on her to-do list: “We’d like to see Washington State be 100 percent paper ballot” – but voters in the military and overseas are still allowed to return ballots via e-mail or fax.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Mueller says she has heard more talk of internet voting since the pandemic may make it more difficult for people to get out to vote – “and I’d really like to push back on that.
“There is no way to secure voting over the internet and we cannot give up our elections when there is so much controversy over foreign and domestic interference,” she said. “We just really need to have that security that our election results are accurate.”
The use of paper ballots, mailed in and subjected to a rigorous set of scrutinies, is the way to do that.
Elections workers processing ballots in King County, Washington State’s most populous county. – photo credit King County Elections