Ballots. This is an hourhe and a half. Pr were thrilled to be presenting a atimely panel t entitled access to the vote, the ballot, and the mailbox. This panel is one of many in a series of Rapid Response webinars. We are planning additional tiona programs on a variety of issues, so please visit ese p americanbar. Org trsj for updates on these programs. To our progr how today will work, its my pleasure t these programs. Before we go to how our day will work, its my pleasure to hand it to angela j. Scott, head of civil rights justice, for a fewj remarks. Welcome,ma angela. Thank you to everyone, thank you for the Civil Rights Committee for planning this very timely panel. Its my pleasure to welcome s everyone who is watching. Before i begin, and i say this before i say anything, i just wantnt to make sure that you all know that im speaking in my l a personal capacity and notci on behalf of my employer. Yer. Nothing that i or any of the tsy panelists say today represents any views of any component of ee the federal government, so ide t just want to make that clear. T in this day and age of a global pandemic, who would have thoughh that we would be living through Something Like this . But obviously over 210,000 21 americans have passed away from covid, so it is imperative that voters are awarereaw of all of r options so that they can cast s their ballot safely during thisa upcoming pandemic. We know that certain voters had obstacles and barriers to votinv even before the pandemic. , for so, for example, disabled and elderly individuals who are ine longterm care facilities face i challenges that you and i may not, and those barriers are obviously increased because of thisse pandemic. There are also homeless d individuals and folks who, for whatever reason, list a p. O. Box as their resident address, and t so they arent easily able to cast a vote. And we all know in various states and jurisdictions that there are new laws requiring purging from voter rolls or ros requiring identification that may not be or easily available some people, and so all of thes. Constitute obstacles that can suppress the vote in many cases. And so to this end, the civil ng rights and social justice rts section are trying to emeliorate these obstructions. We want to highlight some things we ever planned. For example, were engaging in multiple efforts to provide oure members the opportunity to to volunteer and serve the community in ways that can helpt ensure that people can vote thin upcoming election. Up our cosection, along with other aba entities are helping people, attorneys, to become poll workers through our aba poll worker esquire initiative. Ve and those who cant do that, foe those who cant be official polo workers or who cant commit to a long day of service like that, there are Election Protection t opportunities. So the civililopp rightsor and justice section is helping to facilitate connecting our members andf connecting attorneh with nonpartisan organizations, some of whom weve partnered with in the past, lawyers ts und committee for civil rights under the law, national bar association. We are helping to connect individuals who want to serve in shifts to help engage in nonpartisan Election Protection efforts. Our members are also memb workir hard tod create a toolkit that designed for assisting commu individuals and Community Organizations in helping othersi we all know o that there are ma, many, Many Organizations that are well intentioned. We just want toentione make sur they have all of the facts and information and tools that will bebe helpful for them to be abl to help other people. And, finally, in addition to is this one, we have wonderful upcoming programming designed to take a deep dive into overcoming some of these obstacles. Soso obviously we have this wonderful program, and coming up soon, we have another program called obstacles at every turn native vote in a world of coronavirus. We have our program of dignity,r rights, and democracy, a in conversation. We invite you to join in all of this, join in all of these efforts. Jamie, i have to jump off, but i want to thank you, jamie, and all the members of the staff for puttino this together. Elections are quintessential toy our democracy through our nonpartisan programming and through our Community Service voting initiatives this year. Our members of the civil rights and social justice section are committed to being part of the solutions and part of the nonpartisan effort in ensuring s that all votes are counted. Coune so we look forward to you joining us. I think thats it. Im going to turn it back over to jamie. Wonderful. Thank you so very much for those comments, angela. Its wonderful to see you today. You, too. In todays program, we encourage you to ask questions of our panelists through the q and a, not through the chat section. We will address questions at the end of the panel. Day o we will be recording sharingr recording of this program to everyone who hasev registered s that you can share it widely with your networks. There will be captions availabli on thelable recording. T and with that, were thrilled to bring you todays program cess entitled access to the vote, the ballot and the mailbox. E ae there are four members of the panel. Hearill from them for several minutes each about thein prospectives and expertise on us the b issues being discussed today. Up for will open discussion and questions from ss theio audience. I will provide a more full bio of each panelist before they speak. Purposess of initial introductions, im pleased to welcome our esteemed panel of d elected officials, scholars and. Practitioners. The honorable kim wyman, secretary of state of wayman washington, the honorable ellen rosenblum, attorney general of e oregon, and attorney jennifer holmes, assistant counsel at naacp, Legal Defense and education fund. Welcome and thank you all. More americans are expected to i vote by mail inl the upcoming pd president ial electione than in any previous election in our country due to changes made by states and sporesponses to the pandemic. More voters are likely to cast their ballots by mail than go t. The polls in person. But most voters have also not ay voted by mail before, and that may lead to some uncertainty about whats ahead in the next few weeks. First, we will hear from h secretary wyman. Kim wyman is washingtons 15th secretary of state, first elected in 2012. Er she is serving her second term and is only the second female secretary of state in washingtons history. Prior to being elected to this office, kim served as Thurston County elections director for a nearly a decade and was elected Thurston County auditor from 2001 to 2013. Secretary wyman, as washingtonians, we have had vote by mail for a number of years p now. Can you please tell us about on Washington States experience with vote by mail and how you ou address issues of safety and sec security . I would be happy to. Thank you so much for allowing meme to be on this panel, and thank you for the workrk that tn committee and the bar has done. This is a really important topic and a very important year to do this work. Work. Im going to take a minute to bring up, hopefully, if the tech agrees, a Powerpoint Presentation and just walk just through what i would term the speed version of Washington State elections, e andlect are l seeing that . Okay. Im thatnot, ironically. Ats ki thats kind of fun. I love technology. All right. There we go. L, let well, let me talk a little bit g while im trying to get the tech to work. There there we go. Here in Washington State, and i think this is true of election t officials across the country, e were election geeks by nature y like many of you are law geeks,e and we are kind of like the offensive line in football. Do you guys dont Pay Attention to us until something usually goes wrong or we have a pandemic ands now Everyone Needs to vote by mail. So let letme, real quick in th next five too ten minutes, shar with you washingtons kind of path to this and what we do here to ensure that every eligible washingtonian has the right to register to vote and also have their ballot cast. Let me begin by kind of giving you scope and scale perspective of washington elections. We have right now about 4. 7 million registered voters, and p anticipate by election day, we will be knocking on the door ofm 5 million. Num weve had a number of laws over the last 20 years that have really catapulted washington forward to be in a position sitn that, quite frankly, are very good for a pandemic, it turns out. It begins with voter id in 2006 following the closest governors race in history in 2004, washington did adopt voter i. D. E laws that really served our wel votersl. Well. Wit we have not had issues with suppression and even withstood d brenner centers challenge. Im proud of the way we rolled it out because it doesnt oter interfere too much. Gistrati weve had online Voter Registration since 2008 and we l have been voting by mail completely since 2011. In the last ten years, advanc activities andem advancements weve made really have expanded access, starting, of course, with prepaid postage that we ini started doing inn 2018, and in 2019 was really the huge expa expansion of access in Washington State. Same day registration, automatic Voter Registration and preregistration of 16 and great 17yearolds. E the security really balances ite out, and one of the big things we did in 2019 was roll out a 9 near realtime statewide Voter Registration system that we called vote hop. Here in washington our ballots will be available 20 days before election to any voter who wantse to come in and get one. Nd they have to be in the mail by our county auditors in king county its theto elections andw director e 18 days prior to election day. Were we have over 100 voter boxes that peoplece can drop their ballot in if they dont want top use the usps, and were thankfut for that because theres been interesting reporting about the usps. Oregon in washington, and im sure oregon is different than as lon washington, my oregon colleague will talk about that in a minute. As long as we receive a ballot d with a aypostmark on or before a election day, within 20 days ai before election day, that ballot can be counted as long as it rei meets allre the other eligibili requirements. Let meinute stop a here for a m and talk a little bit about what we do to, again, inspire that, because the attorney general have made some pretty disparaging remarks about the ve security and safety of vote by mail, and ive been running votb by mail elections for almost 20t years now, ande i can tell you the security controls we have id place like checking and ying verifying every signature of every returned ballot against the signature on the Voter Registration record is really our security. Gnature we make sure that signature dot matches, and we dont want to disenfranchise a valid vote, so we contact a voter if their signature doesnt match orso is missing. Sometimes voters to forget to s their envelopes. We give that voter an opportunity for a second chance. And that, i think, is a really empowering move that we started probably 15 years ago. Also but its also another security check, because i guarantee you, if you receive a letter from your county election official that says your ballot has been returned and your signature ou doesnt match and you havent voted, youre going to be on thl phone right away to make sure d that ballot has been set aside and is going to be prosecuted ic it is a crime. Crime. Another thing that were seeingg a lot of here in washington that is a little bit newer in the bay last probably five to ten years is what wewe call the ballot ch. Chase. That and that is where campaigns wilt get that list of voters after ar election day whose signatures do not match, theyll go through and find their supporters and theyll go in and follow up on i that as well. This really dramatically helps us reduce the rejection rate. Ur its a good thing, and i think n thats another reasonot why its good that our counties reach out to voters because it equalizes o it forne everyone. Its not just the really wellfinanced campaigns or the t organized campaigns that have hw that eadvantage. Another thing we have with our t new vote law system is the ed voters have the ability i ned totally missed this to e register to vote online, and they can do that have up to eigs days before election day,am ande still do have Voter Registration until 8 00 election night. Put once they put it into the mail stream or put it into the ballot drop box and the county receives it, they can follow that path of signature checking to it being o ready to account, and they can have the assurance their ballot was received and was ready to be counted, and more importantly, if there was a problem they can contact Election Officials to rectify that. As i said earlier, we have a ci 21day certification period in washington, so those allots latearriving ballots that havee valid postmarks can still be counted. One of the things i think is important to get on all of your radar if its not already is s e that i think were going to see a real shift in november that s most of the country has not seen before, and i think oregon and washington voters are used to i. This. Our i think our counterparts across the country are going to be cket shocked to findo out that theyw not going to know who won the election on election night. And i think that most voters inm think thatos that is a final ns answer, and i think all of the y lawyers on this call know that t that is not the case because were working after election day to certify those results. But as you see in this bar graph, this is a typical return pattern that we see, and this is from our 2020 august primary election. What i can tell you,u,el though this is off theth chart in a wa ive never seen before, because typicallyly we do see about 50 r 60 of our ballots come in of election week because of that postmark element. Th but you notice thatat we see a a spike not only on wednesday tere after election day but thursdayh and what we saw in august is is that the volume was so crushing for our counties who are very s good at processing ballots thati it tookng them an entire day tol get through a lot of their latearriving ballots that came through the ballot drop boxes le that, by the way, close at 8 00 election night. I mention this because i think this is a trend were going to see across the country. He those latearriving ballots are going to happen, and i worry about states like oregon, i will be honest, because you e goi potentially are going to be hundreds of thousands of ballots that get to their election with offices with valid postmarks arriving the day after the not election and will not be eligible to be counted in those states. I think we already are seeing litigation on that front across the country, and i think we wile see more of it following election day. But this is definitely going to delay the results in states sta across the country. This was a New York Times graphic that igr just thought w great. The dark blue states are states that have a history of vote by mail elections, the orange bya states or gold states are states that have how shall we say very restrictive absentee laws, and well see probably the lowest turnout of mailin voteri in those states, and all the remaining states are ramping upe their operations and we are wie going to have a wide array of absentee ballot processing and election activity that is vote y mail. Ivity i can assure you that my colleagues have been reaching out to our office and to our county partners, and were all g sharing a lot of information, probably the best thing that bec comes out of preparations for cybersecurity, so we have really been working, trying to get the ready for 2020. The last thing ill leave you with is we have a national hash tag called get out the vote excuse me, my brain is full is trusted info 2020, and thatd really trying to drive people t trusted sources of information like your county Election Officers, your state Election Officers or the bar association, aclu, organizations that you can trust for information, so that people know what they need to do. With that, ith that hope i hit a right and thank you fornd letti me present. Thank you very much, atto secretary wyman. We will next hear from ellen rosenblum. Ellen rosenblum was first elected at attorney general in a 2012 and was elected for a second term november 8, 2016. S she is the first woman to serve as Oregon Attorney general. As she has served as secretary of the American Bar Association as well as chair of the aba section of state and local government law. Five attorney general rosenblum, you represent one of the five states that exclusively votes by mail. R i know youve done exclusive litigation related to vote by d mail. Can you tell us about this and any other relevant legal issues. Sure. Go li thank you so much, jamie. I just want to go like this when you say were one of those vote by mail states with secretary lo wyman. Yay for us. But, look, we understand that its a lot more difficult for o states that havent been to get up to speed, and im so proud oo those in so many states who are really making this effort, because it is so important. Any state that allows for absen absentee voting, which we used toto call it that, can easily fairly easily make this transition in a year where it is so important to do that. So let me start by saying thank you to yyou, jamie, for invitit me to the section of civil rights and social justice. Ice. I love working with you. R our sections do a lot together. And thank you to secretary wyman and my fellow panelists. And for everyone who has shown up virtually this morning to talk about Election Protection. S i see that we have about 250 e people on this panel webinar. So thank you so much for joining us. Us. Obviously, elections are at the heart off our democracy, and thr year states are facing unprecedented challenges from the global coronavirus pandemicc and, frankly, concerns about diminished faith in the election process