More than 10,000 officials across the country run U.S. elections. This interview is part of a series highlighting the election heroes who are the faces of democracy.
Kim Wyman, a registered Republican, began her career in elections in Thurston County, Washington, more than 30 years ago as the election director. She went on to serve as the county’s auditor, as chief local election officials in most parts of Washington are known. Subsequently, she served as Washington’s secretary of state from 2013 to 2021. When she was elected, she was just the second woman to serve in that position in Washington.
During her extensive career in elections, Wyman has been consistently committed to improving election administration and upholding the accessibility, security and accuracy of election processes. As a result of her bipartisan leadership, Wyman was appointed by President Joe Biden to serve as senior election security advisor for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Wyman has been regularly recognized for her contributions to the field of election administration and cybersecurity, including being inducted as a member of the Election Center’s Hall of Fame in 2022. She is currently president of ESI Consulting, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, an advisory board member for States United Democracy Center and a member of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections. Outside of her dedication to election administration, she is also a motorcycle enthusiast and proud grandmother.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
Since July 2024, Wyman has been part of Issue One’s bipartisan National Council on Election Integrity, a group of more than 40 government, political and civil leaders who are devoted to defending the legitimacy of free and fair elections in the United States.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Issue One: How did you end up in this profession?
Kim Wyman: I grew up in Southern California. My husband served in the Army. When we were first married, we spent two years in Germany, and we eventually ended up in Washington state. I applied for the assistant recording manager position in the auditor's office [in Thurston County, where the county seat is Olympia, the capital of Washington]. I ended up becoming the election director in 1993.
When you find the election field, you either love it and you spend your career in it or you get out within the first six months. I was in the former category, and I have never looked back from there.
IO: You started working in elections over 30 years ago, how have you personally seen public attitudes towards elections and day to day work of election offices change in that time?
KW: It's been transformative. When I started, I had to learn about election administration and become an election expert. I needed to understand all of the logistics, the ways that we counted ballots with punch cards and how we got results out and made sure that every eligible voter could register and vote. In 2000, there was a presidential election that kind of changed everything. Suddenly, with the Help America Vote Act [which was signed into law in 2002], I found myself needing to also become an IT expert. Public opinion all of a sudden focused on election administration down to the hanging chads on punch cards. The field really transformed in the early 2000s. By 2016, when Russia started trying to hack into our systems, I had to also become a cybersecurity expert, and then in 2020, we had to become public health experts and communications experts.
My journey is very similar to what election officials across the country have been going through. With all of the ups and downs of foreign interference to close elections, it has put a focus on the administrative part of elections. Sometimes that means that the public gets angry with the way we do our job, when their anger really has more to do with the outcome.
IO: After the 2020 election, we saw trust in election administration drop among sizable segments of the electorate, especially Trump voters. After this year’s election, some Kamala Harris supporters say they have concerns about the integrity of the election processes. Why is it important for people to have trust in elections regardless of whether their preferred candidate wins, and why should people have trust in the results of the 2024 election?
KW: Election officials spend most of their time not only doing their job well technically, but really focusing on building trustworthy elections, leaning into transparency and welcoming observation and oversight. What we've seen in the last four years is that when the losing side of an election starts making accusations of voter fraud or voter suppression, this undermines their base's confidence in the election.
I've lived through a few high-profile, close elections as an administrator. 2000 and 2020 on the presidential side, and, in Washington state, the closest governor's race in the country's history in 2004. Those types of claims are not really unique to either side. Both sides do it. Sometimes it's easier to say the election was rigged, that the referees threw the game, than it is to look at your own campaign and take ownership for maybe not doing the things you needed to do to get it across the line.
IO: During the 2024 general election, dozens of bomb threats were made to polling locations in states key to the Electoral College outcome, including threats from foreign actors. Can you speak to how election officials prepared for such scenarios? What are the implications of such threats on public confidence in elections? What should the United States do moving forward to address foreign interference and foreign malign influence?
KW: One of the things that election officials learned out of the 2016 election was that foreign and domestic adversaries are going to try to attack our election system to undermine confidence. In 2017 when elections were designated as critical infrastructure and [officials] could partner with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, it really changed the way that election officials thought about their jobs. We've shifted from trying to prevent bad things from happening to preparing and asking “What are you going to do when it happens? What are you going to do to respond and recover?” That was a huge shift between 2018 and 2020 as election officials across the country started to prepare for the 2020 presidential election. They were doing it with a focus on foreign interference, both on the cyber side and in regard to foreign malign influence campaigns. All the preparation, incident response plans and tabletop exercises they conducted to prepare for things going wrong in an election ultimately prepared them for Covid and a global pandemic.
When you think back on the success of the 2020 election, there's certainly been a lot said about how people thought that it went, but the reality was election officials across the country conducted a secure election where every eligible voter had an opportunity to register and vote during a global pandemic. A lot of that success came from all of that incident response planning. In 2020, election officials were able to shift gears and redirect assets and resources to retool entire election systems in a matter of months. In the lead up to 2024, I think election officials, myself included, were completely caught off guard with the nonstop assault that we experienced both in the media and on social media about how the election was rigged and how election officials were traitors, for example.
I think the last four years have been taking that focus on preparedness to a new level, asking questions like, “How are we going to deal with it if the losing candidate doesn't accept the results? What are we going to do if people are rioting in front of the election office on election night? What are we going to do when foreign actors try to influence a campaign?” In the 2024 election, election officials focused on the mechanics. They focused on doing the basics well. We had an Election Day where the normal things that go wrong went wrong, people made mistakes, but they had plans to recover.
Finally, we saw activity from foreign malign influence campaigns, trying to undermine the credibility of elections. We saw what the intelligence community suspects were foreign actors behind the bomb threats that were called in and targeted individual polling places. That was something we expected to happen. And so, again, plans were in place and safety measures were taken to make sure voters and staff were safe. Foreign interference is not going to end with this election. It will continue and morph into different threats. Election officials have to be vigilant in how they move forward.
IO: What can be done to better support election officials?
KW: The shift since the 2020 election has been focusing on how to humanize the work that's done by people who run elections. Coming out of 2020, it was very easy to make election officials look like they were part of a deep state plan when, in fact, they were your neighbors, they were people that you worshiped with and people who your kids went to school with. A number of organizations over the last four years have stepped up to humanize the people doing the work. That includes Issue One. There’s also the Bipartisan Policy Center, Johns Hopkins University, the Election Center, the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections and States United, among other organizations, that have really helped to professionalize the election workforce.
This cumulative effort has really strengthened the resolve of the election officials that I've gotten to work with because it is too important to not do this job well. That's the thing that binds election officials together — the commitment to making sure that our representative form of government is going last way longer than we're doing this work.
IO: CISA has also provided training and expertise to election administrators. Based on your experience working as an election security advisor for CISA, can you speak to how CISA works to support the security of our election infrastructure? And how do you anticipate changes to the role of CISA under the new administration will impact election officials?
KW: CISA’s role has been that of a partner and a convener to connect state and local election officials with their federal partners at the FBI, in the intelligence community, and in the cybersecurity and physical security elements of the work that CISA does. There is a wide range of what CISA has done for election jurisdictions. One example is a tabletop exercise in a state or community where CISA brings in experts and gets local election officials to think about threats in a different way and prepare for them. Another example is having a physical security advisor come on site and do an assessment of the security for every threat you could imagine, from a bomb threat to an active shooter, and guide local election officials through additional security measures that would protect voters, workers and ballots.
It's going to be interesting to see how CISA moves forward in the new administration. We are not sure who the new director of CISA will be. The threats to our election systems are real and remain a national security threat as foreign actors try to interfere, but I also have confidence that once we get past political issues for Republicans in Congress, that cool heads will prevail. Once they start having conversations about the role of CISA in local elections, it's going to become very clear that we need to continue this work.
For example: Let’s look at Heidi Hunt, the auditor in Adams County, Washington, who has roughly 10,000 voters. She is fighting [Russian President] Vladimir Putin. She is dealing with threats from China and Iran. We have to level the playing field because small jurisdictions across the country don’t have the capacity to deal with nation-state actors who are trying to get into their systems.
IO: Many people are surprised to learn that the federal government doesn’t routinely fund the costs of running elections. Why do you think the federal government should routinely contribute to election administration costs?
KW: The challenge is that the federal government doesn't routinely contribute to the administration of elections, yet Congress sets very specific rules that are oftentimes very costly in how federal elections must be run.
I've been doing this work long enough that I remember before the 2000 election the disparity between even the 39 counties in my state of Washington. You had some very well-resourced counties, and you had some that were very under-resourced.
From my time as county auditor, I can tell you that when I went to my county commission — the main funders of my operation — to try and get an election deputy position approved, I was competing with the requests of the deputy sheriff and the court administrator. That's the reality on the ground for most election officials.
The Help America Vote Act provided a huge infusion of $3.2 billion to modernize elections across the nation. The problem is there hasn't been a backfill of those funds, so now we are kind of back to where we were in the pre-2000 election era in terms of resource gaps. You have a jurisdiction like Los Angeles County, California, or King County, Washington, where they are well-funded and have a purpose-built building and have technology to make their jobs efficient. The problem is that not every county has those resources.
Going back to Heidi Hunt of Adams County, Washington, who has one full-time staff member. In comparison, King County, Washington, has a few hundred full-time employees. Both counties have to follow the same laws and rules. I say all of this to localize it. Because that's happening in every state across the country. When we're talking about federal funding, we have to start with the baseline of what it takes to conduct an election and how to make sure that there’s a level playing field so every voter across the country has the same experience, the same access and the same level of security.
Now, the challenge with that is when you start talking about federal funding, it gets bogged down in politics. Some states don't want new, unfunded mandates, certainly from the federal government, so they'd rather not accept the money to take on a new responsibility or implement a new policy. I think we have to keep asking Congress and putting it on the front burner. But I think that we might want to shift the perspective to talking about the importance of cybersecurity, the aging systems that we have across the country, and the differences between the technology in well-resourced versus under-resourced counties. I think that type of conversation is less polarizing than other types of election-related policy. We need to have a true conversation about cybersecurity. I don't know too many people that have a 10-year-old cell phone. I don't know too many people that have a 10- or 15-year-old laptop. I think that's an area of election administration where we could start building common ground. And we have a national security interest in making sure the system in Adams County, Washington, is just as secure as King County, Washington.
And if we are able to find the things that we can agree on, maybe we could have a secondary conversation about how to get regular funding for technology replacement for all 50 states and build it out for the long haul so local governments are able to plan and budget and also get regular technological upgrades. My gut instinct is we have to start there before we start getting into the other policies, because they just get mired down with partisan politics.
IO: Outside of your advocating for safe and secure elections, what are some of your hobbies?
KW: The singular most fun in my life is that I have two new grandchildren. Getting to see them frequently is a high priority and probably the highlight of my life right now.
I also enjoy motorcycle riding. My husband is an avid motorcyclist, and I have a feeling that starting in 2025, I might ramp back up a little bit too. I love to travel, and that's one of the reasons why I love my job. I get to travel a lot with my job and see the whole country and see election officials in their native environments, which is a lot of fun.
IO: Which historical figure would you have most like to have had the opportunity to meet and why?
KW: There are a number of women leaders that I would have liked to have met. But if I had to pick one, I think it would be Margaret Thatcher. As prime minister [of the United Kingdom], she had to navigate many major world events, and she did so with a calm hand. The way she led was always inspiring to me when I was an elected official. I wish that I had had the opportunity to actually meet her because she was a woman in leadership at a time when that was not common. She blazed a trail for many women and made it easier for my generation to walk through the doors she kicked down.
Minkin is a research associate at Issue One. Clapp is the campaign manager for election protection at Issue One. Whaley is the director of election protection at Issue One.
.