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Secretary of State Kim Wyman on election integrity in Washington State

With the COVID-19 pandemic dragging on and the 2020 election drawing near, states around the country raced to expand mail-in voting and looked to Washington State for guidance.

Mail-in voting has been a decades-long practice in Washington State. At the helm of Washington’s voting apparatus is Secretary of State Kim Wyman.

Ahead of election night, I spoke with Secretary Wyman about what the Secretary of State’s office did to protect the integrity of mail-in ballots in 2020, the threat posed by foreign actors, what she learned from the events of 2016, and what coordination with county elections departments entails.

Since 2016, and some of the senate reports point to as early as 2014, Russian actors in particular have been trying to infiltrate our elections system in the United States. Many people spin that as it was an attempt to help Donald Trump and it’s been spun very politically. From the data I’ve seen and the reports I read, I think it’s even bigger than that. Russia and countries like China and Iran are trying to disrupt our Republic – our representative form of government. And what they’re trying to do is hit at people’s confidence in our elections. They’re doing it on multiple fronts.”


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