Washington needs a Secretary of State who will keep our elections fair, accurate, and free from shadowy networks of hackers with admittedly cool handles. But we also deserve someone willing to defend our voting system against attacks from our very own President, and someone who will campaign hard to continue expanding voting rights in Washington. Rep. Gael Tarleton is the only candidate in this race who will do both.
Tarleton worked as a senior defense analyst for the Pentagon. She brought that knowledge to bear as Majority Floor Leader in the House, where she passed laws to beef up cybersecurity in our elections, improve voter outreach and education, and expand voter access across the state. She has no experience administering elections, but she’s written the damn bills on elections, and she’s fired up about defending democracy.
In her two terms as Secretary of State and in her 12 years as Thurston County Auditor, incumbent Kim Wyman has directed over 100 elections. Despite all that experience, her implementation of the state’s electronic filing and voter registration system has been a fucking shitshow. According to the Seattle Times, some of the system’s issues were “so troubling” they prompted King County officials to “use parts of King County’s existing system” to run last year’s August primary. Wyman waved away the issues as minor glitches—but they weren’t.
Like nearly every other Republican with a college degree, she actively distances herself from Donald Trump, selling herself as a nonpartisan actor who wants to keep the office politically neutral. She wouldn’t vote in the last presidential primary or explicitly condemn the President’s recent attacks on the voting system she oversees for that very reason, and said she doesn’t “weigh in” on “social issues.”
But that’s horseshit. She was happy to oppose the “social issue” of extending local voting rights to noncitizens (as was Tarleton, for that matter) in our meeting, and happy to oppose the Washington Voting Rights Act in 2012. And though she says she didn’t use her clout as a Secretary of State to testify against H.R. 1—a bill proposed by House Democrats that would expand voter registration, limit voter purges, and end partisan gerrymandering—she and the other Republican Secretaries of State signed a letter to U.S. House leaders in March of 2019 expressing their “deep concern over, and opposition to, HR 1.” Signing a partisan letter opposing a voting rights bill isn’t merely “describing our experience in Washington,” Kim. We may be doing bong rips of tear gas, but we’re not morons. Vote Tarleton.
