Maintaining ethics in contentious elections

"Why do ethics in elections matter? Because if you don't believe in the institutions of our elections, you don't believe our elected officials are legitimate," and undermines our country's very foundation, said Kim Wyman speaking to students at the University of Utah. Wyman is a former Republican Secretary of State for the state of Washington, where she served from 2013 to 2021. Before that, she was a county elections officer for 12 years. She is currently a senior fellow with the Bipartisan Policy Center , the same center where former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt co-chairs the Prevention Initiative . The event, co-sponsored by the University of Utah's Division of Public Affairs and the Hinckley Institute of Politics, was part of the Dalmas H. Nelson lecture series.

Wyman shared that, as an elections officer before the 2020 election, what she and other elections officers were most worried about was Russian hacking and election interference. That concern was not unjustified. According to Congressional testimony in late 2017, given by Sean Edgett, then Twitter's acting general counsel, a total of 36,746 Russian accounts produced approximately 1.4 million tweets in connection to the 2016 U.S. elections, seeking to sow discord and division. But then, 2020 happened and it was so much more than "just" Russian interference.

Wyman detailed five elections she believed changed everything, beginning in 2000. That was the year that, on election night, Al Gore was believed to have won the presidential election. But it all came down to Florida. Remember hanging chads ? One of the results of the 2000 election was the 2002 passage of the "Help America Vote Act" or HAVA , which did away with punchcards and lever-based voting systems, created the Election Assistance Commission and established minimum election administration standards.

The next election that shook up the electoral landscape was the 2004 governor's race in Washington , between Democrat Christine Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi, the closest governor's race in U.S. history. Election Day was Nov. 2, 2004, but the race wouldn't truly be over until June 7, after a judge ruled in Gregoire's favor for the position. On Election Day, Rossi was ahead by 261 votes. A machine recount put him ahead by 42 votes. The Democratic party paid $730,000 for a hand recount, which first had Gregoire up by eight. She held on to the lead, and the final, official decision had her up by 129 votes. Wyman said that election was part of the impetus behind Washington becoming a vote-by-mail state.

Then we have 2016, with its claims of election rigging, cybersecurity threats, voter suppression allegations, Russia trying to influence our elections, and "faithless electors," or members of the Electoral College who cast their vote for someone other than their state's winner. There were seven in 2016 .

In 2018, the Georgia gubernatorial election between Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams was also an election that changed elections going forward. There were accusations of voter suppression, including through the use of an "exact-match" policy which required citizens' names on their government ID to exactly match their names on the voter rolls. The "exact match" system placed more than 53,000 voter registrations — disproportionately those of voters of color — on hold before the 2018 elections because of discrepancies between government records, according to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law. The law was repealed during the next legislative session. Abrams never did concede.

And then we have 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic, a flood of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, voter suppression fears, postal service issues, election fraud allegations, refusal to accept the results of the election and of course, the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. A student asked what is making current elections so contentious and Wyman answered that it used to be when elections were very close. Now, however, contention arises from candidates refusing to accept the results of an election, even when it's not close at all.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Wyman had high praise for elections officers, running elections across nearly 9,000 jurisdictions nationwide. In spite of an increasing amount of hostility and threats , threats like the recent letter containing white powder sent to Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson's office, signed by the "United States Traitor Elimination Army," elections offices continue to do their jobs.

She listed three countries specifically trying not only to disrupt our elections, but to make us hate each other: Russia, China and Iran. "No matter who wins (in November), we are going to see ugliness and it will be exacerbated by our foreign adversaries," she said. Whether the disruptions come from overseas, from people who just want to be disruptors, or from cyber criminals, all of the churn is amplified by artificial intelligence.

What should we do? Wyman did offer hope, as well as concrete suggestions, to the students in the room: