Secretaries of State Lead Charge for Strict Voter Requirements
A number of activist secretaries of state are
dramatically changing a once non-partisan job that
involves supervising elections.
Some have supported partisan legislation. Some have
endorsed or advised their party’s candidates. In 36
states, the secretary of state also holds the title of
chief election official.
The most aggressive of this new group are Republicans
Kris Kobach, 46, of Kansas and Scott Gessler, 47, of
Colorado.
They have been leaders in efforts to enact strict voter
registration requirements in Kansas and to purge voting
rolls in Colorado. Both say they want to stop voter
fraud while critics, including Democrats and civil
rights groups, say the measures would suppress voting.
Kobach and Gessler also have used their offices to
endorse statewide and federal candidates. While Gessler
endorsed Mitt Romney, Kobach said he’s an informal
immigration adviser to the presidential candidate’s
campaign.
However, Romney campaign regional press secretary
Alison Hawkins told News21, that Kobach isn’t an
adviser to the campaign on any issues, either formally
or informally.
Kobach and Gessler aren’t alone.
Secretaries of State Brian Kemp of Georgia and Matt
Schultz of Iowa, both Republicans, have supported voter
ID legislation. All the states that have passed ID laws
have Republican-majority legislatures except Rhode
Island, which had a Democratic majority in 2011 when
its law passed with bipartisan support.
Arizona’s Republican Secretary of State Ken Bennett
added to the birther debate, largely Tea Party-driven,
when he threatened to remove President Barack Obama’s
name from the general election ballot unless Hawaii
sent him the president’s birth certificate.
Bennett has since received it and apologized if he
offended anyone.
Kobach and Gessler, more than others, are changing the
role of a state’s election officer.
Kobach has been involved in national Republican
politics since 2001 when he was chief immigration
adviser to then-U.S. Attorney General John
Ashcroft.
He went on to write S.B. 1070, Arizona’s contentious
anti-immigration law. Three of four parts of that law
were rejected in June by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Gessler addressed the Republican $250-a-plate Lincoln
Day Dinner in Denver in June about voter fraud, saying,
“People on the left say it doesn’t exist … but I’m from
Chicago originally, where they used to say, ‘Vote early
and vote often.’”
“In Denver, there are lots of unaffiliates
(independents), there are lots of Democrats,” said
Gessler. “We call it a target-rich environment. We are
going to win this state. We are going to do it in
Denver by converting people over to our banner, our
point of view.”
Trey Grayson, who was Kentucky’s Republican secretary
of state from 2004-2011, said he “cringes” today at
partisan comments by Republican secretaries of state.
“I was a very proud Republican, but I was very
cognizant of the fact that people needed to be able to
trust elections,” said Grayson, who now directs the
Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy
School of Government.
“So I tried to remember that in what I said, whether it
was on a policy, on politics or on an individual, and
always being aware of that appearance,” he added.
But Gessler believes his outspokenness is respectful to
voters.
“When I say I’m a Republican and this is what I stand
for, I think I’m giving people an honest choice,”
Gessler said. “When people hide their party
affiliation, or when people pretend there is no policy
divide, pretend there is no choice here, what they’re
really doing is masking what those choices are.”
Alexander Keyssar, professor of history and social
policy at the Kennedy School, said the office should be
nonpartisan.
“One of our many problems in the world of elections is
that our election administration is generally partisan.
They’re elected as members of a party. That’s how
Katherine Harris could be secretary of state and state
chair of Bush’s campaign simultaneously,” he
said.
While serving as Florida’s Secretary of State under
then-Gov. Jeb Bush, Harris was accused of partisan bias
as she declared George W. Bush the winner of Florida’s
electoral votes in the 2000 presidential election, a
decision ultimately upheld by the U.S. Supreme
Court.
Unlike Kobach or Gessler, Harris didn’t tackle
controversial public policy issues such as immigration
and voter ID.
Kobach was elected as Kansas secretary of state in 2010
after a two-year stint as Republican Party chairman. He
co-wrote the state’s Secure and Fair Elections Act,
requiring photo ID to vote and, effective next year,
proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Kobach argues he can fairly govern his state’s
elections and also take strong partisan stances. While
campaigning, Kobach told voters he would work on voter
ID and anti-immigration legislation.
“My opponents tried to use that against me,” he said.
He beat his Democratic opponent by more than 21 points.
Kobach believes “a person can be a strong Republican or
a strong Democrat and still approach the administration
of elections with a nonpartisan, evenhanded attitude.”
Similarly, when Gessler took office in January 2011,
the Denver Post reported his intention to continue
practicing law at Hackstaff Gessler LLC. His
Denver-based firm “specializes in campaign and
elections law and has represented a number of
Republican-aligned clients,” according to the
newspaper.
Colorado Common Cause and Colorado Ethics Watch, two
groups that aim to hold government accountable, called
this a conflict of interest.
Gessler consulted with Colorado’s Republican attorney
general and then decided to leave the firm, even though
he said he would have only worked on real estate cases.
“At the end of the day, it caused a lot of controversy
and it really become untenable,” Gessler said.
He’s since spent significant time in the courtroom,
dealing with at least 10 lawsuits. These involve
handling of ballots for inactive voters, attempting to
reform campaign finance in Colorado, and addressing
public access to ballots.
The partisanship of secretaries of state in the role of
chief election official “is an obvious conflict of
interest between the essential obligation to serve all
voters and their attachment to one of the major
political parties,” said Daniel Tokaji, an election law
professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College
of Law.
Click on the image to view an interactive to filter
through the the 36 secretaries of state who also
serve as their state's chief election official.
Currently, more Republicans than Democrats have made
their secretary of state offices partisan, Grayson
said. Of the 36 secretaries of state who are chief
election officers, 23 are Republican and 13 are
Democratic.
One outspoken, partisan Democratic secretary of state
is Minnesota’s Mark Ritchie.
He grabbed the national spotlight through election
recounts. Conservatives questioned Ritchie for calling
Al Franken the winner of a 2008 Senate race, and two
years later Mark Dayton the winner of a gubernatorial
recount.
Both winning candidates are also Democrats.
Ritchie is outspoken on voting rights issues. Unlike
the Republican secretaries of state, he opposes a voter
ID requirement in Minnesota, saying it will
disenfranchise voters and cost millions in unnecessary
expenses.
Minnesota has 4,000 polling places with 30,000 election
judges, Ritchie said. He downplays the influence a
secretary of state has as chief election officer.
“It’s the towns that run the elections. The counties
are the chief election officers and they own and
control their voter list completely,” Ritchie said. “We
don’t own the elections. This is why a lot of this
conversation about secretaries is kind of meaningless
in a way.”
Minnesota Republicans say Ritchie is trying to
influence voters by renaming two proposed
constitutional amendments – one requiring voters to
show photo ID and the other banning same-sex marriage –
on the November ballot.
The GOP legislature called the voter ID amendment
“Photo Identification Required for Voting” and Ritchie
retitled it, “Changes to in-person and absentee voting
and voter registration; provisional ballots.”
Ritchie changed the language of the same-sex amendment
from “Recognition of Marriage Solely Between One Man
and One Woman,” to “Limiting the Status of Marriage to
Opposite Sex Couples.”
Amendment proponents say Ritchie has changed the titles
to confuse voters and help defeat the measures to
benefit Minnesota Democrats.
In a country so divided along party lines, secretaries
should be wary of partisan politics, said Doug Chapin,
a University of Minnesota researcher and director of
the Program for Excellence in Election
Administration.
Jocelyn Benson, a professor at Wayne State University
in Detroit, who was the Michigan Democratic nominee for
secretary of state in 2010, said the officeholder
should be an advocate for voters.
“So the question is are they making decisions
that are in the best interest of the voters or are they
simply advancing what their party’s agenda is?” said
Benson, who wrote “Secretaries of State: Guardians of
the Democratic Process.”
To some degree, she added, the public should expect
secretaries to advance their party’s political agenda.
However, balance is needed in Republicans’ desire for
integrity in elections and Democrats’ expectations for
access to voting, said Benson.
“The challenge is to do both and to essentially make it
easier to vote and harder to cheat,” she said.
In Louisiana, state law keeps some partisan politics
out of the secretary’s office. Secretary of State Tom
Schedler can’t endorse candidates, serve on campaign
committees of candidates or make campaign
contributions.
In New Mexico, Secretary of State Dianna Duran has not
endorsed candidates. Her office believes it would
conflict with the New Mexico Governmental Conduct Act.
Other states’ secretaries don’t endorse candidates out
of personal belief. Massachusetts Secretary of State
William Galvin, a Democrat, hasn’t endorsed a candidate
since he took office in 1995.
South Dakota’s two previous secretaries of state, Chris
Nelson and Joyce Hazeltine, served for a combined 24
years. Like Galvin, they personally choose to never
endorse a candidate.
But in June, South Dakota Secretary of State Jason
Gant, a Republican, endorsed then-Republican
presidential candidate Rick Santorum and South Dakota
Republican state senate candidate Val Rausch.
“The operation of elections has a vast amount of laws,”
Gant said. “Whether people endorse or not or do
different political maneuvers, the laws we have in our
state are very strong.”
Other states stay clear of partisan politics by using
election boards and commissions. State election boards
or commissions administer elections in 11 states and
Washington D.C.
The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, for
example, consists of six former judges as a nonpartisan
staff. Together, they oversee the state’s elections,
campaign finance, ethics and lobbying laws.
“The benefit of having a board like ours is that all of
our judges are trained decision makers. They know how
to weigh the evidence, how to look at the law and how
to apply it,” said Reid Magney, the Wisconsin
Government Accountability Board public information
officer.
With a partisan secretary of state, Magney said,
opponents will say, “it’s because you’re a Democrat or
it’s because you’re a Republican” that a decision was
made.
Kobach and Gessler disagree.
They think a secretary of state who is also the chief
election official means greater accountability.
“They’re not as politically accountable as a single
elected official,” said Kobach of election
boards.
Secretaries of state who also are the chief election
officer “subject themselves to the scrutiny of voters …
so you have public accountability built in,” Gessler
said.
Including Kobach and Gessler, 32 secretaries serving as
chief election officials are elected. Florida,
Pennsylvania and Texas secretaries of state are
appointed by their governors. New Hampshire’s
legislature names its secretary of state.
Delaware Election Commissioner Elaine Manlove, who was
appointed by a Democratic governor to a four-year term,
thinks elected secretaries, who must campaign, should
not alienate other parties.
“I just don’t know how you split yourself down the
middle like that,” she said.
Though Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed, a
12-year veteran, has made political endorsements, he’s
been praised for running elections fairly, most notably
in 2004 when he oversaw the closest gubernatorial
election recount in U.S. history.
Reed, a Republican, introduced two popular changes: the
nation’s first top-two primary system and an
all-vote-by-mail system.
“When you’re there to talk about elections, you’re
there just to make the system work better, not with
some partisan ax to grind, or get back at someone for
something they have done before,” Reed said.
New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner runs his
election system similarly. The Democrat first took
office in 1976 and has since been re-elected by both
Republican and Democratic legislatures.
With Reed and Gardner as possible exceptions, Tokaji
calls addressing partisan election administrations the
great-unfinished business of election reform.
“The past decade we have seen a lot of changes, many of
them positive, but we really haven’t addressed this
problem when it comes to how our elections are run,”
Tokaji said.
Joe Henke was a Hearst Foundations Fellow this
summer for News21.
For comments or feedback, email news@news21.com
