Julie, thanks for doing this with
us and allowing our viewers to get
to know you a little bit better.
Ohh, it's a great opportunity. We are
at point Defiance Park right near the
pagoda. It's beautiful here. Why'd
you pick this location?
One, I don't have a campaign office.
I am an income constrained candidate.
And two, this was where my campaign
kickoff was whenever I first
ran for Pierce County Auditor.
My non my nonpartisan position.
Tell me, what motivates
you? Why are you running
for Secretary of State?
Well, this is what I do.
It's not something that I dabble in.
For the last 13 years I've
conducted hundreds of elections,
protected and preserved documents and
made them accessible to the public,
licensed businesses, etcetera,
which may sound very dry to the viewers,
but it's stuff that I love.
I love making government work for
people and I love the detail,
the accuracy, the precision,
the technology and taking that to scale
and being responsible on a statewide level.
Knowing how important the Secretary of
State is to all the county offices,
it's just something I'm called to do.
Let's talk about that
because you touched on it.
You were Pierce County Auditor
for more than a decade.
Do you think your resume will
really resonate with voters?
I think voters want somebody that's a
technical expert because they read in the
news that election law is very technical
and they understand that elections can
be decided by just a handful of votes.
They also understand that technology.
This is playing a larger and larger role
in everything that we do in government.
So I think they want somebody
that has hands on experience.
I also think that they want somebody that
is dedicated to service to the public.
So I've been managing customer
transactions for a long time and
that's what public service is.
It isn't theoretical,
it touches voters and that's
that's what I do.
I like public service
you are running.
As a nonpartisan candidate, why
yes, I am running as a nonpartisan
because I don't think that the person
who is overseeing Washington state
elections should be wearing A-Team jersey.
I gave a speech to 5th graders the other day,
and when I said that you should have
seen their precious little faces,
they were like, yeah, duh,
because they know all of that
from the kickball field, right?
I don't think that.
I don't think that Americans appreciate.
Having partisanship in this ever
important job of election administration.
I feel so strongly about this that
I am not asking for or receiving
any endorsements from any political
party or receiving or accepting
any money from political parties.
98% of my contributions are from individuals.
This is also something that
I've done all my life.
I have never run in an
office that's partisan.
And in Pierce County,
voters made the.
County Auditor,
the chief election administrator,
nonpartisan by a vote of the people
because they understand that they don't
want a partisan in charge of elections.
One of the main jobs as Secretary
of State is administering elections.
You mentioned you were
talking to 5th graders.
Part of the role is also to educate our
residents in Washington and hopefully
eventually touch those younger voters.
Now 5th graders are far away
from being able to vote,
but how do you?
Plan if you are elected
to reach younger voters,
well first of all the office of the
Superintendent of Public Instruction
and an Advisory Council of social study.
Teachers, U.S. government teachers and the
League of Women Voters are already doing a
bang up job of figuring out how to better
educate and activate those young voters.
And now we can pre register
16 and 17 year olds.
So that is already a great way to
reach into a younger population.
So outside of high school I'm really
going to need. Community help.
One thing that government is not good at,
despite our best intentions,
is reaching out to young people.
We kind of have some old school
communication methods and technology,
and we need to use the platforms
that young voters want to use.
In Pierce County,
I actually hired facilitators to
have focus groups for teenagers,
and we asked them what they knew,
what they wanted to know,
and what they needed.
That's how I would design.
Outreach for young voters,
it needs to be youth LED.
We've got so much leadership in young people.
Yeah, and we ignore it.
Why would you ignore that kind
of human capacity?
So I'm going to harness those young
leaders and ask them to lead the effort.
And then we are going to put the resources,
the energy and the infrastructure behind it.
But the idea really needs to be theirs.
You have said you want more
transparency in the system.
How do you plan to do that
as Secretary of State?
Well, I've got a few different ideas.
So first of all, transparency when
it comes to election security,
making more things open to the public
during our logic and accuracy testing,
etcetera, and not just limiting
it to political parties.
In Pierce County, we do hash checks.
Those are digital fingerprints of software.
Before we start counting ballots
and before we certify an election,
I'd like to see all the counties doing that,
but they do need a little bit of
leadership and instruction and maybe
some rulemaking to make that happen.
I also want to have a risk
limiting audit statewide.
Right now every county does a random ballot
audit called by the political parties.
In every county the political parties get
to decide what race is being sampled,
and in my county they may be all hot
and bothered about a school board race,
but in Cowlitz County it may
be a Senate race.
That means that the counties are
all sampling different races and
they're not sampling them at a
statistically valid manner, the P value.
It's all over the place,
so let's let's augment the audits
that we're doing that are great and
do one statewide risk limiting audit
where we're sampling 1 statewide
race together at a statistically
valid valuable level level.
You said a lot of things that people
may not quite understand because you
have done this for quite some time,
but in real simple terms.
How do you think Washington's
mail and voting system is working
and what can be done better?
I think that our mail in voting
system and the suite of election
laws we have work really well.
It's a perfect balance between security,
auditability, and access.
Very convenient, but secure.
So I like it an awful lot.
There are ways that we could make it better.
Even though vote by mail works
for 9598% of the population,
it doesn't work extremely well for
voters who are living with disabilities.
So that's one example I have plans to.
Expand vote by mail and provide
digital options for voters living
with disabilities and also our
uniformed and overseas voters
that are in combat zones overseas.
Given the fact that we have done
this for a few years or quite
some time in Washington state,
do you think that other states should
also adopt universal mail in voting?
They like to export our evidence
and our confidence to other states.
Pierce County has hosted Hawaii,
Indiana and other states to come and visit,
look at our technology and our procedures.
So we act as a coach and a
consultant to other states.
I think that's the way it should be done.
I think that every state needs to find their
way into the most accessible voting system.
So I don't want Congress to impose our
beautiful set of laws on other states.
I want them to get there.
On their own,
Washington state took decades to get here,
and in the end,
voters are the ones that decided that
they wanted to make vote by mail.
Uniform. They voted with their feet.
They opted in to absentee voting.
I'd like to see other states
find their own journey,
but I've got lots of evidence, technology,
stories and training that I can give them.
So you're saying lead by example,
lead by example.
Absolutely.
OK you told
The Seattle Times that you are
the underdog going into November.
Do you still feel that way?
I have been, yes.
I still think that is going to be hard.
But I have a lot of confidence based
on polling data that's come out.
I've read two polls so far that
basically show that I'm neck
and neck with my opponent,
which tells me that voters and people
responding to surveys when they are
presented with information about
what the Secretary of State does.
And that they have a choice of an
experienced election administrator.
I win.
Do you think that's what differentiates you?
Ohh, I think two things.
One, my resume and practical experience
and then to the fact that I'm not
running with a political party.
Those fifth graders have a lot in common
with the people taking that survey.
If you're elected, what are
you most excited for? Oh,
wow. I am excited about launching things
like the Voice program, voter outreach,
and innovative civic engagement.
I plan on combining philanthropic
dollars with government dollars
and putting granting opportunities
out to local communities where
they know their neighborhoods and
their neighbors the best and they
can propose voter outreach methods.
We're going to make sure that's
best practices, but they can create.
Get out the vote and voter registration
forms that make sense in their community.
It's going to be very different for
teenagers at a grandchild in Asotin
County versus a Somali Community
Center in King County.
And I can't wait to see what
those proposals are like.
Is that something you did in Pierce County?
No. It's something that I've done before,
but it's something that's
absent in Washington state.
It is something I did in Pierce
County for the 2020 census,
though we combined efforts with
big state dollars and local.
Community foundations and did
that low barrier granting as a
community and I think it went very,
very well.
In fact we broke records nationally
for our self response rate in that census.
So it tells me that it's a promising
approach and reaching people to
fill out a census application on
their own is very similar to getting
people to participate in elections.
What has
surprised you most while you've
been running for Secretary of State?
How universally popular it is to
have somebody running that doesn't
belong to a political party.
I have got Republicans who
are passionate Republicans.
They're in the job of electing Republicans
and the same on the democratic side,
and they are willing to set
aside their party interests.
Because they know this office
shouldn't be politicized.
What is something
surprising about you that
the voters might not know?
This is a little embarrassing.
People might not.
They're going to be surprised to know that
I was actually a high school dropout.
Oh, I've got a masters degree with a 4.0 GPA.
I'm a little bit of a nerd.
I've got a national and state
certification and election administration.
I love details,
but I dropped out in high school.
And everything turned out OK.
And I'm definitely not
encouraging people to drop out,
but I think that always surprises people.
So it's surprising me.
Tell me the journey there,
what made you drop out?
And then what made you come
back and finish your education?
I loved classes and I loved learning
and I had some great teachers, but.
Pep rallies, some, the classroom changes.
It just didn't seem very serious to me.
So I tried to enroll in running start,
which back then in 1980 was
kind of a brand new program.
And at that time you had to
have the permission of your
guidance counselor to do that.
My parents were all for it,
but the guidance counselor said I
think that your emotional maturity
and development is more important.
But I'm not gonna sign this,
so I dropped
out. And then you went back to school
and then I went back to college
and loved learning at my own pace,
loved the self-directed learning
of a liberal arts degree.
And then I loved the really rigorous
science when I got my masters degree
in criminal justice administration.
Do you think state
governments should be involved
in regulating how social media
platforms moderate their content?
Here's what I really hope.
I hope that the United States.
Will adopt laws. That bolster
journalism and independent media.
Social media platforms.
Scrape and use media content and
they do it for free and that is
just cannibalizing serious media.
So I want the United States to find
a way of supporting journalism.
To help inform the public and give
them alternatives to what they
may be getting on social media,
which isn't always the plain truth. And.
What do you think the state of
democracy in America is today?
Evolving. Of imperfect. Always um.
It's messy out there right now.
We're having some great debates,
though, about the role of government.
People are learning a lot really fast
about the three branches of government
and how important they are and what
happens when they get chipped away.
So it's messy, it's evolving,
and I want to be part of the solution.
One of the ways that we can do that
is by making sure that people continue
to have confidence in their elections.
And if there's one place that
there's not gonna be drama,
there's not gonna be drama
in my administration and the
Secretary of State's office.
When
we think of Secretary of State,
we often think about running the
elections here in Washington state.
But there's much more to the job.
What else are you excited
to do in that office?
I'm excited to use a network of community
organizations to educate people about
address confidentiality program,
which protects crime victims and
survivors of domestic violence from
revealing their residential locations
as they participate in civic life.
It protects them from revealing their
address and voter registration.
Marriage applications and coming
soon from real property ownership.
We're making the rules about that right now.
I we only have about 2000 enrollees.
I think that there are more people out there
that could benefit from the confidentiality.
I'm also interested in
modernizing the way we intake,
preserve and make accessible public records.
So many records that government generates
right now are digitally native records.
We need to be able to take them in
all sorts of formats in a high volume,
richly index them and then turn them around
and make them accessible to the public.
And I think that's where my public
records experience comes in.
You've mentioned a few times about
modernizing the office and using
technology as a bigger part of
the Secretary of State's office.
Can you explain that?
Um. Well, for example,
you may have heard that we have some
problems with a disparate impacts on
populations who fail their signature
verification in their ballot.
You always have to sign your ballot.
Well, very young people, people of color,
people that don't speak English well,
have a hard time passing that and their
ballots get rejected at a higher rate.
I'm ready to look for alternatives
to signatures as a method of
verifying a voter identity.
There is technology out there.
We do it in banking all the time.
So I want to gather technologists and
stakeholders and find an alternative,
not to replace signatures,
but to give special
populations and alternative.
And Julie, while
we are here and we are chatting,
I'm sure that not all of your time is.
Occupied by just looking at Secretary
of State stuff. So what are,
what are some of the things that
you like to do on your off time?
Definitely community oriented.
I belong to a lot of nonprofit organizations,
so going to events in the community now
my community is going to be much bigger.
So I'm really looking forward
to the community events,
the fairs and festivals and the
convenings all across the state.
So I love people, I love how invested
they are in their communities.
And their passion for bringing
unity to this country.
And that's the way I like to spend my time.
Julie, I've had a great
conversation with you.
Thanks so much for your time today.
Yeah, thank you.
Thanks for shining a light on this race.
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