Kim Wyman, Washington’s former top election official, shares what keeps her up at night and why she still has faith in U.S. democracy

WASHINGTON – In October 2021, a year after winning a third term as Washington’s top election official and the only Republican elected to statewide office, Kim Wyman surprised many by announcing she would step down to join the Biden administration.

At the end of a year that began with supporters of Donald Trump assaulting the Capitol – motivated by the former president’s insistence that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, despite Trump’s own allies and advisors telling him he had lost – Wyman started work as the head of election security at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

“That was a tough decision to make, but I really felt that it was a call to duty,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “Certainly, the political optics weren’t lost on me. It was challenging being a Republican who was recently elected and walking away from that and moving into a Democratic administration. … I just thought that this was a way to use my skill set that would benefit the whole country.”

Now living in Jacksonville, Florida, where she moved at the end of 2021 after a brief stint in the D.C. suburbs, Wyman said her biggest priority at CISA, as the agency is known, was to help state and local election officials across the country strengthen the security of their systems against physical and digital threats. That challenge was heightened by a “constant onslaught of people accusing them of rigging the election and doing something nefarious,” she said, when in reality they had pulled off the extraordinary feat of running a successful election during a pandemic.

While she found her work at CISA rewarding, Wyman said she wanted to work on a broader range of issues, including the importance of states updating their voter registration and the impact of an “exodus” of election officials and poll workers driven out by threats and harassment in the wake of the 2020 elections.

“The role that CISA plays is really narrow when you look at the full complement of election administration experience that I have,” she said, “and what I found by the end of ‘22 was that I really wanted to talk about more than just cyber and physical security of our election system.”

After 19 months at CISA, Wyman joined the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center in August. She said the timing of her move was partly about giving the agency time to replace her before 2024 and partly because of the urgency she feels to address the workforce crisis and other challenges to next year’s elections.

While Wyman said Washington state has fared relatively well amid the exodus of county auditors and other election chiefs – who play an unusually technical role for elected officials – many states are in dire straits. She said North Carolina, for instance, has lost half of its county election officials since 2020.

“That’s one of the things that keeps me up at night,” she said. “How do we bring in this new crop of election officials and get them ready to run the biggest election that our country has ever had?”

Across the country, Wyman said, the thousands of people who keep American democracy running realize that failure is not an option and they’ve “got to just buckle down and get the work done.” In the longer term, she said, the Bipartisan Policy Center is looking beyond 2024 to understand how states and counties can do a better job of hiring and retaining election workers.

Since the 2020 election, the most fervent election deniers have drawn outsized attention, but Wyman said election officials are realizing that their efforts are better spent on “telling their story” to the broader set of people who may have concerns but want to better understand how their votes are counted. She said the presidential election in 2000, won narrowly by a Republican, and the Democratic victory in Washington’s historically close 2004 gubernatorial race are useful precedents.

“My experience in 2000 and 2004 tells me that there’s always going to be a group of people that are never going to be convinced,” she said. “And that can’t stop us from telling the story and continuing to move the technology and the election systems forward.”

Some of that technology has come under fire from Trump supporters since 2020. In 2022, GOP officials in Ferry, Lincoln and Grant counties got rid of an election security tool designed to alert the government to a potential hacking attempt after Washington Republicans circulated a memo that suggested it was part of a left-wing conspiracy, NPR and KNKX reported.

In a similar development, several Republican-led states have opted out of a tool called the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which Wyman helped create and build nearly a decade ago. ERIC lets states share government data to keep their voter rolls up to date, a key way to prevent the rare cases in which people vote in multiple states.

“What’s unfortunate with ERIC is that you’ve taken a tool that really did help states keep their rolls more current and up-to-date – and now how they’re going to replace it, I don’t know,” she said. “The politics of elections right now really make it difficult to make non-emotional policy decisions.”

Despite her concerns about the U.S. election system, Wyman said she takes solace in the nation’s nearly quarter-millennium history of overcoming challenges to democracy – and in the election workers who make it work.

“I think there is a camaraderie that’s coming back,” she said. “That’s what gives me hope, that the people that do this work are really committed to the idea of our constitutional republic, of American democracy. They know that they have an important role in reporting election results that reflect the way that their voters voted, and that their voters have confidence in, and I think that coming out of 2020, they’re getting that second wind finally.”