Rebuilding confidence in the integrity and safety of the election process may be one of the biggest tasks for Washington’s next Secretary of State. But there are other non-election issues at play in the race between the incumbent, Democrat Steve Hobbs, who was appointed to the job last year, and his non-partisan opponent, Pierce County Auditor Julie Anderson. (See the duties of the Secretary of State and his office here.)
The candidates participated in a televised debate Sunday at Gonzaga University. It was sponsored by the League of Women Voters, the Spokesman-Review, KSPS Public Television and Gonzaga.
Steve Hobbs was a state senator representing a Snohomish County district when he was appointed Secretary of State in November 2021. He is a lieutenant colonel in the Washington Army National Guard. He commanded 750 guard members when they served in western Washington food banks during the Covid pandemic. He has worked for the National Security Agency, helping to administer elections in Kosovo and Iraq.
“This makes me uniquely qualified to be your Secretary of State, taking on cyber and misinformation threats as I’ve already done in this office,” Hobbs said.
Julie Anderson was elected as Pierce County auditor in 2009. She has also served as a non-partisan member of the Tacoma City Council, was a policy advisor for the state Department of Commerce and led the YWCA of Tacoma-Pierce County. She is a past president of the Washington State Association of County Auditors. She says she has national and state certifications in election administration and a state certification in public records.
She finished second in the August primary election, despite not being affiliated with a major party.
“I’m running as a non-partisan because polarization is tearing our country apart. Our politics are broken,” Anderson said. “We need to protect the Secretary of State’s office from partisan influence.”
Here, we summarize the candidates’ positions on several issues.
What are the biggest misconceptions about elections?
Julie Anderson: “We live in a great state with a paper-based vote-by-mail system, which means we have a great audit trail. So I think the biggest misconception is how person-centered elections still is and what a manual job it still is, despite the advances in technology. And that really goes to some of the misinformation and disinformation that we’re experiencing in our community and around the United States and folks not necessarily understanding because they don’t work in elections. What do our tabulation systems do? How votes are counted. What a manual or machine recount is. And with my 12 years of experience, I really enjoy engaging the public in explaining those details and I think that’s one of the only ways that we can get through some of the misinformation…There’s deniers and there’s doubters. I like working with the doubters.”
Steve Hobbs: “We’ve done a very good job of telling people how to vote and put the ballot in the mail and in the drop box. What we haven’t done is a good job of telling people how our elections are ran here. What we have been doing in my office is we launched the ‘Vote with Confidence’ campaign to talk about how elections are ran here, the life cycle of the ballot. You’ve heard many times that dead people vote. That is simply not true. That people can vote multiple times and not get caught. That is simply not true…Also, the transparency. People think that elections are hidden behind a wall…Auditor Anderson will let you go into her election center. Any auditor, Vicky Dalton here in Spokane County, will let you see the voting process going on, see the ballots come in, see them being counted. And we don’t do enough about that. We don’t tell you what’s going on, which is why some of the distrust is happening.”
Despite the state working to make voting easier (same-day registration, restoring voter rights to people convicted of felonies, adding ballot drop boxes), voter turnout is still low during many elections.
How do you encourage people to vote and how would you work to increase turnout?
Steve Hobbs: “There’s two ways we’re going to approach it. We are developing a team to go out to the various communities, who are underrepresented, who don’t usually go out to vote. I talked to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in the Tri-Cities, perhaps teaming up with them, reaching out to their various communities. The other thing we need to do is get to our young people, encourage them to vote, getting them in the mindset to vote before they turn voting age. One of the things that we have been leaning forward on and working on is developing a mobile game app for your people, so they can go on there and they can vote for an imaginary character, maybe get points. We’ll throw civics questions at them, to get them involved now so they’re ready to go when they turn voting age.”
Julie Anderson: “Job one is making sure that we’re eliminating barriers to access. Washington state has exhausted the most obvious barriers, so it’s pretty easy to participate. The one thing that is tested and true, that turns a non-voter to a voter is interpersonal communication. It’s having somebody ask you or share with you why the election is important. It might be a candidate that doorbells. It could be a neighbor, a co-worker or what happens at your kitchen table…What I’m proposing is to reach through community. I’m launching the VOICE program, Voter Outreach and Innovative Civic Engagement, with really low barrier grants, similar to what we did in Pierce County very successfully with the 2020 census, combining philanthropic dollars with government dollars and making them easy to apply for to see what kind of innovative activities you come up with to get that vote out and get that interpersonal communication.”
What are your views about ranked choice voting? And how would you handle that type of election, even if it’s just at a local level?
Julie Anderson: “I support the local option bill that has been kicking around in the state legislature for about six years now. Ranked choice voting is being used in about 50 communities around the country and it really isn’t a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. It’s going to be on the ballot in three counties this November. I support ranked choice voting and this local option because I respect voters and I respect communities…Ranked choice voting is not that much different than a woman’s right to vote, being able to vote when you turn 18 years old, or vote-by-mail. All things that were started at a local level. When they were started as a local option, they had challenges and they weren’t uniformly popular either.”
Steve Hobbs: “They are on the ballot in various places and as your Secretary of State, I will honor that. But I don’t like ranked choice voting and the reason I don’t is it disenfranchises communities and it leaves us vulnerable for disinformation. Think about what’s going on right now with our elections, what happened January 6. People have doubts over elections and now you’re going to have an election based upon an algorithm and the number of votes and people just don’t have the trust right now. That’s why now is not a good time to do it.”
Much of the attention in the Washington Secretary of State campaign is focused on elections because the office oversees elections, but the office also oversees the state archives, which leads to the next question.
How would you improve and modernize the state archives to provide more access and transparency to archival materials?
Steve Hobbs: “We have to do more rapid converting of records to digital. One thing I realized rather quickly is the amount of paper records that we need to convert so you can have access to the Internet and people can see it. I’ve visited many of the archives, including the one at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, and I noticed that the equipment needs to be updated. Larger scanners need to be done. Some of our archives need to ship larger documents to Olympia to get them scanned, so we’re in the process of providing larger scanners, more efficient scanners and providing more people. We were depleted during the last Great Recession and we didn’t get those people back so that we can scan those records.”
Julie Anderson: “The state archives has a legacy of being very paper-based. But turning paper documents into images by digitizing them isn’t the future. We’ve got a backlog, we need to do that in order to preserve those documents. But I’m going to be focused like a laser on modernizing the state archives…Think about what’s happening in government right now. We are producing, at the state and local level, more digitally native documents at a higher volume than you can imagine. That means these are records that have never been a piece of paper and they’re complex. They’re digital. They’re interactive. Think about the redistricting process that we just went through. Yes, it produced a paper map that was adopted. But think about all the interactive versions of that map that are important parts of that history. Think about all the online meetings that local and state government is having right now. That’s online and digital with all of those chats, all of the attached documents. Who’s preserving those records for history and making them accessible for you so you can hold government accountable? I will.”
The Secretary of State’s office also regulates charities and non-profits. In 2021, the legislature required changes in the way non-profits and charities file their annual online reports with the state. The changes led to computer problems, which the Secretary of State’s office is working to fix. It asked its constituents to file paper reports instead, which the office is entering manually.
“This created a two-to-three month backlog, which means that important charities that you and I rely on to do work in the community are showing up as delinquent on the state system and some of them are even administratively dissolved,” Anderson said.
She says that’s causing problems for a lot of organizations.
Hobbs says this was a situation he inherited when he was appointed to replace Kim Wyman last year. The remedy, he says, was the best of two bad options.
“Do the paper option or do nothing and allow the buildup of these non-profits to accumulate, which we weren’t going to do,” he said. “So we had to do that option and, of course, we are working on it and we believe that our site will be back online in November.”
