We know some of you are out there voting for incumbent Secretary of State Kim Wyman because you find some sort of elemental wisdom in the idea of a Republican overseeing the electoral policy of a largely Democratic state. Somehow, you believe this dynamic maintains some balance in the force, and achieving that balance is so seductive it causes you to overlook the fact that she opposed the Washington Voting Rights Act in 2012. To the extent you fit that description, we hope the last few months have disabused you of that notion.
In an attempt to steal the election, the President has spent a lot of his time attacking mail-in voting, the system we’ve used here in Washington for years. In response, our Secretary of State has refused to use the power of her office to condemn him for it. She argues that issuing such a condemnation would politicize her role and thus undermine faith in the state’s electoral process, and so she’ll continue to dance around Trump’s nonsense and just restate Washington’s experience with vote-by-mail instead. But condemning the President for directly attacking our democracy isn’t partisan, it’s the right thing for the state’s chief elections officer to do.
