Vote by mail isn’t perfect, but works, says top US state election official

OLYMPIA, Wash. (NEWS 1130) — As Americans prepare for a possible presidential election in the era of COVID-19, Washington state’s secretary of state says it’s time to park the partisanship and work to ensure people can vote, even if it’s by mail.

Wyman’s job has all the same letters, but few of the same duties as the federal secretary of state — her job is to ensure the security and fairness of Washington’s decentralized election system.

And the entire system is vote-by-mail.

“It’s disappointing when anyone in a leadership position is critical of either the security or the accessibility of our elections [in Washington] by accusing people of perpetrating voter fraud or voter suppression,” Wyman tells NEWS 1130.

When leaders make statements like that, she says, it can undermine faith in one of the key pillars of democracy.

“With this moment and this crisis, we have to come together in a bipartisan way and figure out how we’re going to make a safe, accessible election in November that both sides can have confidence in.”

She says it’s critical to run a transparent election that relies on many processes to show the final result.

Vote-by-mail isn’t free from complications related to COVID-19, however, and election officials will be working to figure out a workaround.

Ballots are processed by hand, in part, so Wyman says they’ll need to figure out how to make the processing appropriately socially distant.

The Fix

There is no one-size-fits-all fix that can be slapped on to the American electoral problem, but states will need to come up with “hybrid” solutions, Wyman says.

“Make no mistake, vote by mail isn’t the perfect solution any more than poll site voting is, so we’ll need to roll up our sleeves and make it work.”

Elections in the United States are carried out by individual states, meaning that there is unlikely going to be a federal solution.

Whatever the fix may be, Wyman says it needs to prioritize getting as many ballots into as many eligible hands as possible.

The Partisanship

In a tweet, President Trump wrote that Republicans must fight hard against vote-by-mail, saying that it never seems to work out in Republican’s favour.

Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans. @foxandfriends

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2020

“On the surface, people could say that [Washingtonians] haven’t elected a Republican governor since 1980, and that it favours Democrats. But I think that’s not really thinking deeper,” Wyman says.

She says that since the system puts ballots in the hands of each eligible voter, it doesn’t give an advantage to any political side. But the game is now different — campaigns must be run differently, and are often more expensive, she says.

“We have to view the conduct of elections in what’s best for voters, and making sure that every eligible person has the opportunity to participate.”

She says that viewing this problem through a partisan lens doesn’t get us anywhere closer to a meaningful solution.