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Podcast: How states hold fair elections

Podcast: How states hold fair elections
Let's Find Common Ground

Until recently most of us outside of state government didn’t know much about the role of Secretary of State, the state’s top election official. We simply didn’t think about it. But since 2020, election laws and procedures have been in the spotlight – and election officials have come under attack.

In this episode of Let’s Find Common Ground, we meet Democrat Steve Hobbs, Secretary of State for Washington, and Republican Michael Adams, Secretary of State for Kentucky.


Kentucky is a vote-in-person state, while Washington has voting by mail and at the drop-box. But no matter how people vote, suspicion of the entire process is rife. In recent years both men have encountered election deniers and faced threats to themselves and their staff.

This episode is from the Let' Find Common Ground podcast as a part of The Democracy Group.

Take a listen.

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Getty Images, Liudmila Chernetska

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In the rush to “dismantle the administrative state,” some insist that freeing people from “burdensome bureaucracy” will unleash thriving. Will it? Let’s look together.

A century ago, bureaucracy was minimal. The 1920s followed a worldwide pandemic that killed an estimated 17.4–50 million people. While the virus spread, the Great War raged; we can still picture the dehumanizing use of mustard gas and trench warfare. When the war ended, the Roaring Twenties erupted as an antidote to grief. Despite Prohibition, life was a party—until the crash of 1929. The 1930s opened with a global depression, record joblessness, homelessness, and hunger. Despair spread faster than the pandemic had.

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