Ep. 10: Kim Wyman, Former Washington Secretary of State and BPC Senior Elections Fellow

The Ballot Box Briefing is a weekly segment on Sirius XM’s The Briefing, that examines the issues and storylines at the heart of running an efficient and accurate election. Guests include election administrators, local, state, and federal officials, cybersecurity experts, legal analysts, and members of BPC’s Democracy Program.

Kim Wyman joined the Ballot Box Briefing to talk about the election security environment in 2024 and efforts underway in jurisdictions across the country to defend against threats to our voting systems.

Transcript

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Steve Scully (SS): Every Friday we focus on issues involving the elections and our democracy. Pleased to have in studio Kim Wyman. She is a senior fellow here at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and Kim, as a way of introduction, you come to this issue, why? 

Kim Wyman (KW): I come at this issue as an election administrator first and foremost. I started as the election director in Thurston County, Washington back in 1993, and moved up to county auditor and then eventually Secretary of State of Washington. So, my roots are really election administration and making sure that every eligible voter has an opportunity to cast a ballot and have it counted correctly. 

SS: We’ve had conversations in the past, and often with some of your colleagues and peers what I find interesting is that the issues in Washington State are the very same issues in Florida, California, Pennsylvania, and New England. 

KW: Absolutely. Each state has their own take on how they want to conduct elections and have variations on the way that they allow their voters to vote, but at the end of the day there’s real commonality in what election officials do. 

SS: Let me share with you what the Department of Homeland Security is saying about the threat assessment. And the DHS is saying that the 2024 election is expected to represent a quote–key event for possible violence and foreign influence targeting our election infrastructure, our process, and our person. Break that down. 

KW: Well, certainly since the 2016 election we’ve seen foreign influence operations on Americans very consistently, and certainly peaking in presidential elections. They’re using tactics that go back to the Cold War to try to influence people. Some would call that propaganda, and they’re really trying to divide Americans, and elections are a really good way to do that because you have people that want Democrats to win, and people that want Republicans to win. So that’s kind of the first layer. And then the second layer is, those same foreign actors are trying to get into our systems. They’re trying to create cybercrime so that they can maybe make money. They’re trying to make Americans believe our system is not secure, so they have not stopped those attacks and have been trying to get into systems since probably 2014. On top of that with 2020, from January 6th to today, you have domestic actors who also are not wanting to see the election system work well. There’s been kind of a constant attack on the system. 

SS: And as you point out, a lot of rhetoric when it comes to election security. But as somebody who has been on the front lines, do you have faith or maybe the better way to say is, do you trust our election system? 

KW: Absolutely. We have over the entire United States about 8,800 individual jurisdictions that run elections. And I think that the strength and the biggest challenge of our system is that our elections are run locally. I think that some Americans believe there’s some ‘National Election Office’ that oversees this activity, but in reality it’s county clerks and municipal judges and clerks that run our elections. They are accountable to their local voters and I think that’s the biggest strength. The challenge is those 8,800 jurisdictions are funded very differently, so some are very well resourced, others struggle to make sure they have the basics covered. 

SS: So when Kim Wyman thinks about the issue of election security, the possibility or the threat of hacking, what concerns you the most? What do you think this audience needs to know? 

KW: My biggest concern is that there’s real disparity in funding for election offices across the country. And so that directly translates to their ability to secure their systems, to be able to be responsive to the cybersecurity threats that they’re facing. That said, the organization I used to work for—the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA—has had a laser focus on trying to level that playing field and really giving education to local election officials on how to secure their systems and giving them resources to do the basics well. They’ve done a really good job of it. There’s still a lot of work to do and all of that is a direct result of elections infrastructure being deemed critical infrastructure by both the Obama administration and the Trump administrations. 

SS: When you look at claims that there are people trying to hack into the system and again these are run by local officials and the machines are operated in many cases by volunteers or those who get paid a nominal amount, is that even possible? 

KW: (With) the tabulation systems, no. I’m very confident that over the last eight years there’s been a real focus on making sure that tabulation systems—those systems that count ballots—are not connected to the Internet, they are standalone systems that are secured. So really that allows the local officials to just look at how do you protect from insider threats, how do you secure those systems? What’s a challenge is how much of the election system has been put out on the Internet. Everything from websites that provide voters information to election night reporting sites. And those are the systems that obviously every day they’re trying to secure, but they are on the Internet. So, like every other device we have in our lives from our phones to our individual computers, they’re all targets and they’re all subject to somebody trying to hack into them. 

SS: Let me follow up on that point because clearly a well-run election is something that we want all sides want that. But what about the basics? What should people who are on the front lines, people like you in Thurston, Washington? What should they be doing? Because this is an evolving process and it’s a challenging process. 

KW: Well, the good news is because we’ve had this concentrated effort going back to 2017 of really having an awareness of cybersecurity, election officials across the country have been doing things like having tabletop exercises and trying to think through all of the places where they could be attacked, both cyber and physical security issues, and trying to figure out how they would just respond to an incident, but more importantly, how they’re going to recover—how they’re going to restore their systems and restore public confidence in whatever system was compromised or hacked. They have had a laser focus on that. They’ve been building out those layers of security and they’ve been working with partners from the federal government, the FBI, CISA, the federal partners there, their own National Guards and then also working with vendors and the security community to make sure their systems are secure. So I think that they have been doing everything they can to make sure that 2024 is going to be a secure election. 

SS: We are talking to Kim Wyman. She is a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. And as you look at all of these issues, one of the things that I keep coming back to is more and more Republicans, 65-70% based on exit poll numbers, believe that the 2020 election was stolen. 

KW: I think that that’s really the issue we have to focus on. We’re talking about roughly 30 million voters in the United States that don’t believe our election system is secure. They don’t believe that the 2020 election results were legitimate and I’m not sure we’re ever going to convince them that that was a fair election. And so we have to move forward, and listen to that criticism, and bring them into the discussion and be able to move forward as a country, because ultimately we’re talking about the foundation of our Democracy. 

SS: Because there’s no evidence of that, but clearly there is that belief. 

KW: Yes. And I think you know it’s important to remember that we’ve had recounts in all of the close presidential races in the states or the localities where the race was close, and all of the recounts confirmed the original results. We’ve had many court cases that were either dismissed or the court upheld the results that were official, and it’s been adjudicated in all the ways that the election is set up to have the checks and balances, and still, that narrative resonates with a lot of Americans. So we’ve got to figure out a way forward. 

SS: Well, thank you so much for being with us and being in studio and my final question is this that if you think there was one thing that people knew or understood better about our election system from your standpoint, what would be? 

KW: I think that the one thing is that the elections are local: It is your local clerk, your auditor, your local municipal judge, your municipal clerk. And if you have questions, go to them. And get engaged, get involved. We need poll workers as we go into this fall election cycle. One of the best ways for people to understand our election system is to be part of it. So, volunteer or sign up to be a poll worker, or work in your election office in your local County Auditor’s Office, because they need workers. And I think when people see that firsthand and see the checks and balances in place, when they see the bipartisan parts that are baked into the system where you have a Democrat and a Republican who are looking at ballots, it changes your perspective, and it hopefully builds the confidence that our system is fair and secure and accessible. 

SS: Terrific comments, great insight. Thank you for stopping by, Kim Wyman here at the Bipartisan Policy Center. We appreciate it, thank you.