Washington’s former top voting officials urge patience on Election Day

WASHINGTON – On Election Night in 2000, it looked like Sam Reed was going to lose.

His Democratic opponent held a narrow lead in the race to be Washington’s next secretary of state, and Reed, a Republican who then served as Thurston County auditor, recalls getting consolation notes before he realized that he was inching closer to victory as more votes were counted.

Reed, who graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane and earned degrees from Washington State University before becoming a local election official in Western Washington, eventually won that race and served as Washington state’s top election official for a dozen years. In an interview, he recalled his first statewide election to underscore the need for patience on Election Day.

“I think the voters should have confidence and trust in the elections process,” said Reed, 83. “So much work has been done on it – speaking here in the state of Washington, particularly over the last two decades – that we are very fortunate to have perhaps the best system in the nation.”

The U.S. Constitution leaves the administration of elections to the states, which in turn delegate many of the responsibilities of election administration to counties. That decentralization makes for a resilient system that is less vulnerable to bad actors, but it also enables confusion and misinformation about the way voting happens in each jurisdiction.

When Reed retired after the 2012 election, the Republican who had succeeded him as Thurston County’s top election official, Kim Wyman, won the race to replace him. Less than a year after she won a third term, she stepped down in October 2021 and took on a new role as the head of election security at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Now a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center after leaving CISA in July 2023, Wyman said in an interview that the United States’ decentralized election system means some states will have their results sooner than others. In Washington, for instance, ballots must only be postmarked or deposited in an official drop box on Election Day, whereas in some other states they are only counted if they arrive by Election Day.

“That doesn’t mean that there’s any nefarious activities happening with those ballots,” Wyman said. “It simply means that the process has to be done in accordance with state law, and so the idea that any election outcome is going to be known and finalized on Election Night is patently false on its face. We are not going to know who won the presidential election officially for a week or two after Election Day.”

The Associated Press and other news outlets traditionally “call” states once they conclude which candidate appears likely to win as results from decisive “swing states” come in on Election Day and the days that follow, but official results come only after all votes are counted. States have their own deadlines for certifying results, with most of them in late November or early December.

Washington state has pioneered vote-by-mail elections, with any voter allowed to opt into absentee voting starting in 1991 and universal mail-in voting enacted two decades later. But in many states, the coronavirus pandemic forced the rapid adoption or expansion of mail-in voting in 2020, and former President Donald Trump and his allies have cast doubt on the legitimacy of votes that are counted after Election Day.

“I think it is very unfortunate that the presidential candidate for one of the major parties is openly undermining people’s trust and confidence in the system,” Reed said. “And it is counterproductive for him, because if people don’t trust it, then many of them just flat out aren’t going to vote.”

After suggesting the 2016 election was “rigged” before he won it, Trump has refused to admit he lost the 2020 election and has made questioning the legitimacy of that outcome a virtual requirement for membership in the Republican Party. This year, he has repeatedly said that the only way he could lose is if Democrats “cheat,” setting the stage for more claims of fraud if he loses.

“I don’t expect him to concede under any circumstances,” said Cornell Clayton, a professor of political science at Washington State University. “If he does not win, he’ll say it was stolen from him again.”

Clayton said he expects the Democratic campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris may challenge a close Trump victory in court, as any candidate is entitled to do, but Harris would concede if it becomes clear she has lost.

Wyman said voters should be aware that false information about the election also will come from countries that want to disrupt voting in the United States, taking advantage of “the partisan divide and the rancor that we’re all experiencing when we go on social media.” That already happened in late October, when U.S. officials said Russia was behind a fake video that purported to show a poll worker ripping up ballots in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania.

“Our foreign adversaries want to use that discord to sow doubt about the integrity of our election system, because they want Americans to believe that their elected leaders are not legitimate, because they want to really divide us from within,” Wyman said. “And so we anticipate that we’re going to see more of this type of activity in the days leading into the election, and certainly in the days after the election.”

If voters have questions or doubts about voting in their areas, Wyman said, they should contact their county auditor’s office. She advised that if they see claims of election interference or other suspicious activity elsewhere in the country, voters should check multiple news sources and avoid jumping to conclusions.

Wyman said election officials in Washington and across the country – as well as her former colleagues at CISA – have taken steps to improve the physical security and cybersecurity of the election system. That includes protecting election officials and poll workers, who have received an unprecedented volume of threats since the 2020 election.

“We in America take pride in our democracy,” Reed said. “It is very important that people defend our system of government and respect the election workers.”

Reed said voters should “have more trust, but also obviously we need to verify,” and he emphasized that there are numerous measures in place to detect voter fraud and other violations of election law.

The security of the vote-by-mail system has been in the spotlight after police said a suspect set fire to ballot drop boxes in Vancouver, Washington, and Portland on Oct. 28. A fire-suppression system prevented damage to most of the ballots in Oregon, officials said, but hundreds of ballots were damaged in Washington.

“It’s sad we’ve come to the point where we have to have such high level of security just to stop people from doing crazy things,” Reed said. “Unfortunately, the kind of rhetoric that is going on regarding elections and vote-by-mail and drop boxes does lead to some people who are pretty extreme pulling stunts like this, but I think overall, it’s not going to really have any consequence in the election.”

A spokesman for Washington’s Office of the Secretary of State, Greg Tito, said in an email that voters can sign up to track their ballots at VoteWA.gov, and if they believe their ballot has been lost or damaged, they can request a replacement ballot, print one from that website or obtain one from an in-person voting center. Only one ballot from each voter will be accepted and counted.

Clayton said many voters are rightly tired of a presidential campaign that has been filled with increasingly heated rhetoric, but he urged Americans to turn out and vote.

“Our democracy is only as good as our citizens, and so they have an obligation to be informed and to engage in the political system and cast their votes,” he said. “That’s what I would encourage them to do, and then have confidence that their vote matters.”

The National Association of Secretaries of State maintains a website with information about voting in any state at CanIVote.org. Voters in Washington state can find information and track their ballots at VoteWA.gov, and voters in Idaho can do the same at VoteIdaho.gov.