WASHINGTON - Committee on House Administration top Republican Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) recently spoke with Washington's Secretary of State Kim Wyman, who oversees the state's all mail-in election process. Wyman discusses how complicated vote by mail is, how it took Washington decades to implement it, and some problems seen by other states rushing to expand the process ahead of November.

Recent primaries held by states throughout the country reported voter confusion, long lines because of consolidated polling locations, and ballot issues, including voters applying several times for mail-in ballots, duplicate ballots, unsigned ballots that were not signed, and other issues that risk voter disenfranchisement.

Difference Between Vote by Mail and Absentee Voting

Ranking Member Davis: "Well so really vote-by-mail is not the same process as getting and requesting an absentee ballot, right?"

Secretary Wyman: "That's correct, and it's a subtle difference. But you know, I would really describe the difference between the two is that an absentee ballot requires the voter to take action to get one. So, the voter by default is either a polling-place voter or a vote-center voter, and if they want to get an absentee ballot, they can choose to. And that varies by state. Some states like ours was before we were vote-by-mail had had what we called permanent absentee voting where you could get an absentee ballot every election. Some states you have to request them proactively every election, and in some states, you have to have an excuse there has to be a reason why you need to vote an absentee ballot. And each state has its own reasons for doing that in this long political culture in history, and now they're rapidly having to check that paradigm."

Balancing Making it Easy to Vote with Preventing Fraud

Ranking Member Davis: "Great! So, you mentioned it took a while for Washington state to be able to implement the vote-by-mail process. What issues did you have with the process itself maybe, you know, in regards to concerns with the postal service?"

Secretary Wyman: "…And so, the ways that you do that is you build in compensating controls. First and foremost, in our state is we have, first of all, a voter ID requirement at the time of voter registration. So, since 2006 in Washington state voters have to provide either their Washington state driver's license, Washington state ID card, or the last four digits of their social security number. And what this does is - and the vast majority of our applicants provide one of those -three ninety-eight percent - we do have a provision for alternative IDs for those who don't have it, but I mention that because the first level is we have a high confidence level that the people on our rolls are real people. You know, I hear frequently, you know, how do you know they're not dogs or they're false, you know, registrations? Well that's our first check.

"The second check is that every single returned ballot signature has a signature that the voter signs on there, testing to an oath that they're eligible. And that signature is compared to that original voter registration signature, and surprisingly over our lifetimes our signatures remain pretty consistent. They do change potentially in the beginning of your voting life and towards the end of your life but in the middle they stay consistent, and the people that check signatures are trained by Washington State Patrol, and they if they don't find a match, they notify the voter, which serves two purposes: one, gives a voter a second chance, but also is a security check, because I guarantee you, Representative Davis, if you got a letter from your county election official that said your ballot have been returned, and your signature didn't match, and you hadn't voted yet, you'd be on the phone in a heartbeat to let him know it's a fraudulent ballot. So, that's the first line of security.

"We have spent decades building in internal controls. I think in 2004, that bad election I mentioned, we had many problems at the polls, and we had many problems with absentee ballots. The biggest one was we didn't have good internal controls. So, trays of ballots were missed, they got set places, and they didn't get counted, and they were found, and then now all of a sudden you have to explain to the public why four hundred ballots are gonna be added to the count, because election officials didn't do their job. So, what's really important for the counties and local election officials that are doing this work right now is you have to have reconciliation measures. You have to count how many ballots you received back and you have to be able to say down to every single last one whether or not it was counted, and if it wasn't counted why it was rejected. And all of those measures are designed to compare to the totals that come out of the machines that count the ballots. And ultimately, it's creating a very robust audit trail to be able to explain to a critic that you didn't suppress voters and that you didn't have voter fraud."

Vote by Mail Took Washington State "Decades" to Implement

Ranking Member Davis: "So, you know, you would mentioned in some interviews before that states, you know, may not be nearly as ready as other states to fully implement a vote-by-mail program before this November -- before it's a presidential race. What metric do you think is in play, needs to be in place for states, and what do all the states look like when it comes to the possibility of being ready for a program that you just said took how many years to implement in Washington?"

Secretary Wyman: "Decades. You know, at least five, closer to probably to twenty. Well a number of things. I think the first real big challenge that we all face is first of all personnel, and it doesn't matter if you are a polling place state, if you are an in-person voting state, if you are a vote-by-mail state, right now our election workforce - and it is a robust workforce - is over 65. The vast majority of it I'd say probably half the two-thirds of our workers are over 65, these are people that may not be able to come into work even if they want to because they'd be at high risk. So, we're going to have a huge recruitment effort no matter what type of voting system we have to try to backfill those positions.

"The second challenge is that, do we have the printing capacity not only for ballots, but for all of the envelopes that are going to need to be printed to send to voters and have them send the ballot back? And that sounds really rudimentary and I'm sure people are right now thinking, "well there's plenty of printers," but it's a very specialized printing that the envelopes themselves are customized. You have to make sure you even have the stock of paper nationwide to do this and have the printer printing capacity and these states need to work with their postal officials to make sure they meet all the regulations for those envelopes. So, even if you could do all of that the biggest challenge is we are all going to need to print our ballots and our envelopes basically at the same time…"

Funds from Congress have Helped States Communicate and Strengthen Cybersecurity

Ranking Member Davis: "Which is why we have you on. I want everyone that can see this broadcast to understand some of the concerns that our state election officials have. I know you've been very vocal with your counterparts in other states, other secretaries of states and other election administration officials. What are they telling you, because as you know and as my viewers, our viewers right now, know your state is much different than our state when it comes to elections and the processes that are in place, so, what are your colleagues telling you?"

Secretary Wyman: "…I think one of the great unintended benefits from the money that we received from Congress for election cybersecurity has really helped us communicate in a way we could not have done four years ago or even two years ago. As you know representative, "elections" was designated as critical infrastructure in 2016 and that has allowed election officials all the way from local you know towns and cities and counties that do elections to state officials like me to be able to get the resources to really build out cybersecurity, and one of those parts is we built out communication systems to share when we get hacked or you know if some event happens to be able to share that in almost real-time and that has helped us share information about how do you know bring up absentee voting, how to move to vote-by-mail, in a way we just didn't communicate even two years ago. So, that part, you know, I know Congress – Members of Congress – get beat up all the time, because you don't give us enough money at the states, but I can say thank you for all of the resources that Congress provided in terms of money and all of the intelligence that we've received and the information we received from Department of Homeland Security and the FBI and so many of our federal partners that we're in a much stronger position for cybersecurity and quite frankly dealing with this pandemic than we would have been in 2016."

Increasing Transparency and a Football Analogy

Ranking Member Davis: "Any other problems that you're seeing right now with Washington that you saw during that implementation process that we need to understand that could be a part of this rush to put a nationwide standard in place for this election in November?"

Secretary Wyman: "…It's a fact, and we have to start anticipating that now, and part of this is transparency. We need to have opportunities for people to observe have cameras in those facilities, so people can watch 24/7 what's happening and then inspire confidence and that's what we have to do.

"One last thing I do want to put on this topic is I'm noticing that Raiders blanket in the background, and I don't have any Seahawks paraphernalia behind me, doggonit, is election officials really regardless of your political stripes consider ourselves a lot like the offensive line in football. See, if we do our job, you don't notice us. You notice a quarterback, and you notice the running back and the receiver. And that's kind of what we like to be is we like to be the unsung heroes. And so, our, you know, our goal is to not be the lead story of the day after the election we want you talking about, you know, the candidates and who's winning and losing, not the mechanics of the election. So, I can say across the board, across the country, election officials really are just trying to do that job."