Secretary of State Sam Reed, elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004 and 2008, sat down with the Auburn Reporter to talk about some of his goals and accomplishments:

Tell us about some of the problems you have dealt with in your time in office.

As you may recall, we had a number of problems in the 2004 gubernatorial recount. A lot of it was because from the time of our Constitutional Convention of 1889, we have believed that we should decentralize the elections process, leaving it up to the counties to decide how they are going to conduct the elections. While I believe in local control, I believe we have found that in this modern age we need more consistency, more professionalism and such. So what we have done over the last five years is a considerable amount of election reform through the legislature to upgrade our election system.

Tell us about some of these reforms.

One of the most important is that in 2006 we created for the first time a consolidated voter registration system in the office of the Secretary of State. We always had 39 separate voter registration systems. What I can do as Secretary of State is get access to databases listing deceased people and felons that our counties just can’t get access to and help clean up our rolls. One of the worst problems in 2004 was the number of people who voted illegally, but that’s because they were registered to vote illegally. By getting them off the voter registration rolls, we increase the public’s confidence in the process. We also got the primary moved back to August. This gives the elections operations a chance to put together the general election in a methodical way. Before, we had seven weeks between the primary and general elections. But even that is deceptive, because we didn’t certify the primary until 10 days after. And then, obviously, for any recounts, which there often are in local races, that delays it further. Actually, we ended up with 19 days to put together the general election because the ballots had to be in the mail like 20 days before the general election. So anyway, just by moving it back, it’s also more feasible for military and overseas voters to vote by getting more time between the primary and the general to get their ballots and get them back.

How about getting information to voters?

One major overarching theme in this day and age is of people being overwhelmed with too much information from television or print media or the Internet. So, how do you get the information to the voter, how do you get voter information that is valid, how does the voter sort the information he or she needs? Well, we have been focusing on that. We are now leading the nation in terms of information that is available to every voter online, including what we call My Vote, where you can go and put in your name and birthdate, and up will come the offices that you are eligible to vote in or that serve you like legislators and congressmen. During the election cycle, you can link over to voter pamphlet statements and such.

You also took grief and praise for your performance during the 2004 gubernatorial election.

I had been the Thurston County auditor for a couple decades, and it’s the county auditor in every county but King who has the responsibility for elections. I have been through a number of recounts, and I recognize that my responsibility to the people is to play this straight and in some way to play the referee. You leave your partisanship at the door when you walk in, because you are elected to serve all the people in the state. Times got tough there, and even friends were criticizing me. First, the Democrats were mad at me and took me to court, and the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in my favor. Then, a week later, Republicans sued me at the state Supreme Court, and I won a unanimous state decision, and they were mad at me. But I think the citizens appreciated it.

You also have tried to make improvements on behalf of veterans.

We had a bill that would have allowed military and overseas people to vote by e-mail, not by going online to a Website, but by e-mail. That means they gave their e-mail to the county elections office, and the county elections office would e-mail out each person his or her ballot. They would receive it, download it, print it out, including the affidavit that you sign and date and all that. They would sign it, date it, scan it and email it back to the county office. When this idea was first proposed, I said, ‘Wait a minute, can we actually do all this?’ We checked with the Department of Defense and the Washington National Guard, and they said absolutely. They loved the idea. In fact, the Department of Defense showed up to testify at each of the hearings, as did the Washington National Guard and the Veterans Association. The bill passed unanimously in the House. This is something used in other states as well. It’s not new, and no one had had any problems with it. But we had one state senator, Sen. Eric Oemig from the 45th, which is Woodinville and Kirkland, who was opposed to it. He was vice chair of the committee in the Senate, and even though we think the other 48 senators were ready to vote for it, it never got to a vote. He comes out of the tech sector up there, which worries about diabolical programmers and such. We said, ‘Yeah those things are possible,’ so we always put in double checks. We have to be running what we call logic in action tests to see if the system correctly functions and be vigilant. Too bad the bill didn’t pass. We intend to bring it back next session.

Are there still kinks in the system you want to iron out?

Challenges continue to be for voter information and outreach, that’s reaching out to groups that are not represented or underrepresented in the electorate, such as people with disabilities. We’ve been making a lot of progress there with equipment that’s available, particularly to those for whom English is a second language. I continue to focus on youth. It’s not like there’s going to be a magic bullet there to get young people involved, but we have been making some progress. Participation has increased from 2000 to now. So I do college civics tours of colleges in the state. We have a number of programs like mock elections that we do with high schools.