Last November, the High Turnout Wide Margins team held a live event looking ahead to 2024’s election cycle.
Hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey spoke - for the first time – with Secretary of State-level election administrators: Gabriel Sterling in Georgia and Trey Grayson in Kentucky. They spoke about some of the things they’ve learned during their time working in elections.
High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits:
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Transcription of the episode is as follows:
Gabriel Sterling: For all you elections officials out there, you are not alone. I feel like there's an orchestrated effort to cut you off from your friends to make you worried about your text messages and your emails and your ORRs and trying to stress you out, but you're not alone. Elections officials across the country are feeling your pain, and I know you have friends in every state in this nation who are praying for you and looking out for you and hoping the best for you. I just want you to know that. I just feel anytime I get in front of elections officials, I feel a need to tell them that because they need to hear it.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]
Managing Producer Aaron Hay: Last November, the High Turnout Wide Margins team held a live event looking ahead at 2024’s election cycle. Hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey spoke – for the first time – with Secretary of State-level election administrators: Gabriel Sterling in Georgia and Trey Grayson in Kentucky.
They spoke about some of the things they’ve learned during their time working in elections. You can watch a video recording of the full interview right now at kbia.org.
Eric Fey: Welcome to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. I'm Eric Fey, I'm the director of elections in St. Louis County, and my co-host is –
Brianna Lennon: Brianna Lennon. I'm the County Clerk here in Boone County.
Eric Fey: And the original conception for this podcast was really like a for us, by us podcast for local election officials, and this is, I think, actually the first time we're interviewing state election officials.
Brianna Lennon: Yes.
Eric Fey: So, we were hesitant to do this because, you know, state election officials really don't run elections, right?
Laughter
Trey Grayson: We’re the enemy, right?
Eric Fey: Yeah.
Laughter
So, if you two gentlemen don't mind introducing yourselves – maybe Trey, if you don't mind going first and tell us who you are, and start off, we always start off by having people introduce themselves and telling us how they got involved in elections in the first place, and if you could just take turns and we'll start that way.
Trey Grayson: Sure. I'm Trey Grayson. I was the Kentucky Secretary of State from 2004 through 2011, and for the last 12 years, I've still [been] around elections as a consultant and as a volunteer. If it helps, I do represent the county clerks in Kentucky in the legislature, so that maybe gives me some local administrator cred – and I even [am] a poll worker now. I help, I checked in voters in my – I live in Boone County, Kentucky – I was a poll worker for Boone County, so I cared about election administration and politics for a long time, but I did – the election administration piece was something that I came by kind of naturally from the early days, and it's something that I really enjoy.
Gabriel Sterling: And I'm Gabriel Sterling. I'm the Chief Operating Officer for the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger. There’s different sides of elections – I came from the campaign side for many years of my life, and when Secretary Raffensperger was elected, I'd run his first city council race back in 2011, and they were looking to staff up and they offered me the job of Chief Operating Officer, I had no idea that I'd be moving into the, what became – the big thing was the voting system implementation manager where we had to roll out the largest implementation of voting machines in American history – on time and under budget. So, I kind of fell ass backwards into it, and I've gone around the country and every time I asked the question, “Who here, as a kid, dreamed they’d be in election administration – no hands go up.
Brianna Lennon: Well, I think first the question that I wanted to ask and why – maybe not Eric – but why I wanted to talk to you both is the other thing that we haven't had is really kind of a conversation about really high-profile states now. We've talked to some last year, we talked to some in our previous seasons, but we've now been through 2020. Gabriel, I think had one of the most prominent aftereffects of the election, of 2020, and now we're going into 2024. So, what are you doing now to prepare for 2024, after everything you've been through in 2020?
Gabriel Sterling: The main thing, you know, for 2020 is, I think, everybody got stuck with a census being pushed back, and then we had to do redistricting and our voter registration systems, and we're going through court cases, right now, we're having to redraw lines, they’re rebuilding ballots for in, like, nine weeks. So, we're really focusing on that. So, we partnered with some people in the GIS side to make sure that all of our voters are put in the right street segments and everything, so that everybody's enfranchised properly. So, we're putting a lot of energy towards that.
A lot of new ballot tracking – we rolled out a brand-new voter registration system in two parts. The forward facing one to the voters was rolled out during the 2022 election – that was online voter registration, My Voter page where you can go find where you can vote and all that kind of stuff, Absentee Ballot request portal, and we also put together, what we call our “Data Hub,” which kind of shows everything [that] happened [in] the election, because I think we learned some stuff from 2020 going into 2022 and now 2024 – is to be ridiculously, stupidly transparent about “this is how many absentee ballots have been requested,” “this is how many have been mailed,” “this is how many have been, you know, cured,” “this is how many have been rejected.” So you can stay ahead of these arguments, so people don't think at the end that like 1000s of ballots randomly showed up.
“No, we knew where those ballots were, guys. They were here on the Data Hub three weeks ago, you knew all this,” and working with the county elections officials to make sure they're keeping up with the stuff on their end, on the voter registration side. Because one of the things that's kind of unique about Georgia is we're a top-down state in every single way. I mean, we own the voting machines, we have the voter registration system, we work with our county elections official for them to execute the [elections], but we give them – we pay for all the tools for all that, I mean, literally, they pay for ballot paper and they train their poll workers and elections administration people at the county level, but we own all the equipment and everything. So, it really is a partnership.
And like you said, you don't have state guys on here often because there's always sort of this tension of like, “We didn't do it. They did it. No, they did it. You didn't do it.” So, it's always you have to kind of accept that tension is going to be there and have to hug each other's neck to get through it because we're going to sink or swim together when we do these things.
Eric Fey: And so, to follow on from that –Trey, you mentioned, obviously you were Secretary of State in Kentucky, but more recently said you've represented the county clerks, the Kentucky county clerks in the legislature. In Kentucky, there seems to be this unique happenstance that the Clerk’s Association, state election officials in the legislature – all work together to pass an elections bill that, you know, was a real compromise, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of that going on across the country right now. So, can you talk about what happened in Kentucky –
Trey Grayson: Yeah.
Eric Fey: – and what is your experience been with that?
Trey Grayson: So, Kentucky, going into the 2020 election, we were a pretty traditional state. You had to have an excuse to vote in advance of Election Day. So, not many people voted by mail, or we have some in-person absentee as well, you know, under 5% of the votes were cast in advance of Election Day, very traditional method.
We have a May primary, and, you know, COVID hits in March – when I was at office, after some of the, there was a terrorist attack in, I think it was Spain, right before an election that caused a bunch of states, and Kentucky was one of them – to pass a law of like, “Okay, what happens if an emergency happens on election” – 9/11 was Election Day, terrorist attacked, Hurricane Sandy. So, we passed a law to give the Governor and the Secretary of State the ability to postpone an election. It had never been used before. It had never been tested. Well, in the final days of the 2020 session, they expanded that to give the Secretary and the Governor – who was then Mike Adams and is still Mike Adams and Andy Beshear, the Governor – the ability to change the manner of elections, and to make it clear we couldn't have an election in May the way we normally did it.
And so, they did two things – they pushed it to June and then they switched to mostly vote by mail in the primary, and then I'd say there was a lot more vote in-person, but early on election day because we knew we were gonna have fewer poll workers, fewer locations, and it worked really well. From an administrative standpoint, we had high turnout, voters liked the extra options, and I think this is important from a political standpoint – Kentucky has become very Republican over the last few years – Republicans had a great election. The Republican legislators in the House and the Senate added to their numbers, and so, you had this combination of voters liked some of the earlier options, there was not a political downside on election day, so Secretary Adams started going around the state saying, “I think we should make some of this permanent, we should have early voting for a few days, we should have a portal for absentee balloting, we should allow a cure process,” and we also quickly agreed that there wasn't consensus or political support for vote by mail, so let's just sort of leave that out, but let's make some of these things permanent.
And the clerks – actually, at that point, they hired me. So, I came in to help to be the lobbyist in 2021, and we had a big meeting where the State Board had a list, the Secretary of State had a list, clerks had a list, and we all kind of came together and agreed on things, and we had some legislators who said, “we want to do this,” and we navigated it through a session that was mostly, you know, 2021 was a remote session, you can only be in the state capitol if you weren't a legislator, or a staffer if you had an appointment, and so, we got it done and we've been tweaking it the last couple of years, but there was a nice confluence – we had a Secretary who was open to the idea and had some credibility on the Right, we had good political outcomes, and voters liked it, and so – and we also did, again, we didn't ask for too much, you know, we didn't push for the vote by mail. Those who wanted vote by mail were disappointed. We also only have three days of early voting because that's all we could get, and three was better than zero, and I appreciate the clerks’ willingness to embrace changes because for many years they’d resisted some of these things. And I think they had money in 2020 because of all the federal money and also the Zuckerbucks that helped out local election officials in Kentucky, too.
And so, it was a good, it was good to do it, and they're like, “Oh, if we can do this in a pandemic, maybe we can do it on a normal election day.” It is a bright light, you know, we've seen a lot of political fights over the last couple of years and elections, and Kentucky was one where Republican legislators passed the bill, the Governor signed it, and then we, you know, we've continued to tweak it and refine it, and it's gone pretty well. So, I'm proud of, I'm proud of my state.
Brianna Lennon: Gabriel, I'm wondering if you can touch on – since you mentioned that you had started on the campaign side of things and then are now in a much more administrative but still, you know, get the flack of politics – what that experience has been, like moving from a political into an administrative role and what impact it's had on your opinion about elections administration,
Gabriel Sterling: Well, frankly, it was helpful coming from that side of the world, to have a better understanding of the election side of the world, and, as you mentioned, Georgia is one of those states. Kentucky is very good and, you know, red now. Georgia is a little more purplish, leans red in off year kind of elections. So, when we had SB202, I had to go around and basically say, “There was a politically dumb thing that was done. The leadership in the House and the Senate said, ‘Introduce whatever you have to introduce to calm your people down,’ which led to a lot of really bad ideas being introduced, that became the thing that framed up the discussion around this.” Like eliminating no excuse absentee, which we'd have for 15 years, cutting back on early voting, outlawing Sunday voting – those were all dropped. None of them were ever part of the actual bill, and understanding the mechanisms of that allowed us not to freak out too bad, and we were able to bring in our county elections administrators to talk to the leadership to say, “I know you think this is a good idea. This is why it's a bad idea,” and we were able to stop a lot of bad legislation, which I think is what's happened in most of the country.
I think a lot of people were freaked out that there was going to be over the top things to try to cut back on turnout and everything, but in Georgia protected, you know, no excuse, expanded early voting to where the majority of our state now has 19 days of early voting anywhere in their county, and then when we rolled out the new systems, we were able to get down to the – there was all this controversy around line warming, you can't get people water, and there's literally on Election Day 2022 – there were no lines. There was this whole article about this guy that was going to test that law, so he loaded up his car with water and food and drove around and couldn't find any lines anywhere. So, it made sense - because our election administrators, what they're having to do is they’re having to police things outside the voting area, which is difficult to do when you're trying to control your voting area.
I come from the school of thought that as long as the rules are even for everybody, and they're explained well in advance – they're just rules that everybody has to follow. Nobody gains, nobody loses based on a lot of these rules. There are certain things, I know, out there like ballot harvesting, which I think is a terrible idea and that can have partisan implications, mainly because politically, Democrats tend to live in dense urban areas, Republicans tend to live in wider suburban and rural areas. So, I can go to an apartment building and get 100 ballots, or I can go and drive for 17 hours and get 50 ballots somewhere else. So, there are things that can have those political impacts, but most of the studies show that most administration tools don't help one way or the other, and if you get people to sort of understand that, because they have these inclinations to believe that they do because they've been told that for years.
And one thing that, I think, I've tried to explain to election officials, I mean elected officials, is help doesn't help unless it helps. So, when you add tons of new processes on, you think you're providing new chains of custody, all this new writing and everything – they're just more failed points than aren't actually doing a lot. There are good election administration procedures that are done across the country. That's one of the things I think that some of the elected officials have really chapped to me. They’ll say things, “Well, I know we had a good election here, but those guys out in that other state, I don't know what they do.” I've gotten these people in a room and said “[you know] exactly what they do – they identify voters, they issue one ballot, they put a record for voting down, they count the votes, they have chain of custody, they do all the same things you just do just a little bit differently.” That's the way, it's how it's done just about everywhere in America. So, I think we can defend the whole system, even though there's slight differences, and that's another great security features – we don't have a nationalized election with the same rules everywhere, and everybody can do what they want. Like Trey gets their three days, which I think is really low, but like look at New York that didn't have, they had no early voting until like last year. I mean – but they were criticizing us as “Jim Crow 2.0.” We won't get into that, though. It's helped to be coming from the other side, to be able to explain to elected officials what elections administrators have to deal with.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]
Brianna Lennon: So, I have a question for both of you. We're seeing a lot, and we know – Eric and I are both in our state association – lots of turnover, lots of new county clerks, local election administrators. For us, it poses a challenge in our association to try to figure out how to train them and mentor them and bring them in because we want to make sure they're doing elections well in their own counties. I guess, for Gabriel – how is your office dealing with it? And for Trey – how is your association dealing with it?
Gabriel Sterling: Um, well first thing we have our session coming up starting in January. We already met with the Governor and the House and Senate staff, and we were asking for a lot more money to have a lot more liaisons out there. We only have four liaisons that cover the whole state right now. It's 159 counties, and we're also working with our association, GAVREO, which is the Georgia Association of voting registrars and elections officials, GAVREO, and we have a three-day conference, and we are struggling to get everything in we need to get in. I mean, to the point now – I'm assuming everybody's heard about the fentanyl letters that got sent to our state and so many others. I am having to work with them to get Narcan distributed, and training done on that. That's going to be 45 minutes of our conference for three days because we’re dealing with that kind of craziness.
And this is on top of having a lot of new people, and the good part is now we are now in like, really the third full election cycle with these new processes in place, with the refinements we made in 2022 and we've had really successful elections – outside of we had some issues in the primary, but it was really focused on one county, it just happen to be the biggest county in Georgia that historically had issues – but from like, October of 2020 to now we've had really successful, high turnout elections, where people have gotten to choose how they wanted to vote.
Our elections officials, and I'm sure this is the same in so many states – we kind of break it down by regions and you have official regions, but you also have the people who are the really great clerks who their other fellow counties next door, they got a problem, they'll call them before they call us and try to figure it out on their own, and we kind of lean on that a lot. And we put together working groups with those county elections officials – especially around our voter registration system that we built. We work hand in hand on a lot of these processes as we go, and all the front-end processes are great, we're still working on some backend processes, which are not totally coded properly yet, but with any big launch like this, I mean, it's we've got 1000s of hours with the county elections officials and the UAT [User Acceptance Testing] testers, and we've now run 172 different elections with about 500 contests on the system, and everyone's gotten to vote, no one's been disenfranchised, everything's working the way supposed to.
But it is hard with all of the stuff they have to deal with now. Just the pressures outside of that, like I think I was telling you before, I've been all over the country and I've had elected officials crying, you know, with the stress they have to deal with. And it's from both sides – yes, it's mainly from Trumpy Republicans right now who still think the election was stolen, but they have the same crazies from the Left who've been saying since 2016, “the machines stole elections,” and they're still beating them up. And having to deal with open records requests or FOIAs, whatever you call them, we’re going to do extra training on that. Outside of just running elections – all this other administrative crap, and it is not easy, and as you know, the pay is just so great in all these jobs, but people do it for the love of doing it. It's an American thing to do. They're serving their fellow man and woman and trying to make the gears of democracy function. So, I try to lift the, up as best I can on that front and tell them they are doing a great thing, and we're going through an unfortunate, weird subset of time that I'm hoping will even itself out. And one of the good things about some of this turnovers is we’re getting some younger folks who are more technologically oriented, who can manage the change better in some cases. So, it's not 100% bad, but we are losing a lot of institutional knowledge.
Trey Grayson: You know, we, Kentucky saw 25% of our clerks not run for reelection in 2022. Some of that was, you know, fatigue from elections. Some of that was, some of the folks it was just time. Yeah, like it wasn't, it didn't matter what was going on in the world, they were just, it was just ready to retire.
A lot of our new clerks worked in the office, but not in the election space, you know, one of the things I've noticed is that most of the clerks were on like the automotive side – clerks are the front line of the customer service facing element for license plates in Kentucky, they also do the mortgages and deeds. And so, you might come, the person who runs the deed room might become the clerk or the person who ran auto might become the clerk. And they don't really know anything about election – they helped because it's all hands-on deck in election season – and so, one of the stressors we have, we're not a battleground state, but we're modernizing every part of the office. Elections have been modernized, as we talked earlier, since 2020. It's no longer Election Day in Kentucky, it's, you know, election weeks and months, right? But then the auto side – the state’s rolling out a brand-new database at the end of this year, and that, I don't know how that's gonna roll. I hope it works out fine, but they're gonna close for a week and somebody's gonna come in on the Tuesday, January 2nd, “Why can't I get my new tag today?” “Well, did you hear the news?” “No, well, I'm mad at you.” That's not my decisions, the state's decision. So, they’re having to do that, and then they also having to get more of the deeds and mortgages and things online. So, they're just getting hit left and right.
So, one of the things that the Clerks Association does [indistinguishable], and a big part of that is nobody's allowed in the room, no sponsors, nobody like me, or anybody, and they just – it's kind of like open mic night, you know, it's a roundtable and you talk about what's on your mind, and some of it, some of it's just purely to vent, and I don't actually know because I'm not in the room, but somebody that knows venting, but it's also just a way to gather and then they train.
Gabe mentioned using, leaning on some of the more experienced clerks, or election administrators in Georgia. Yeah, we have some great clerks in Kentucky who’ve have been doing this for a while, and they want to help. And one of the things that I've always been really proud of in Kentucky is we have two really large counties – Fayette County, which is Lexington, and then Jefferson County, which is, Louisville is located there – those two counties don't really need the Association. What they do is so different on the one hand, but on the other hand – they're registering voters, they're identifying precincts, their recording deeds, you know, they're doing the same things – and for decades, they've been involved in the Association helping out, like there's literally a bible of how to process, like, they call it the Blevins Bible because the last two clerks in Fayette County were both named Don Blevins, and the Blevins Bible is a Bible that's used all throughout [the state] on how to do deed recordings, and they come in to do best practices on elections, and so, that, you know, helping out the new folks is a big deal. You know, we were lucky that we had a lower turnout election – we had a governor's race this year, which is a little bit lighter. It's more like a federal midterm in turnout. So, a lot of the clerks their first election was that and the turnout in the primaries were really, really low, which is bad for democracy, but good when you're trying to learn how to do it, you know, run an election. So, that was fortunate this year, and then they don't, I don't think they know what they're getting into next year for these new dozen, couple dozen folks.
Brianna Lennon: Since you brought up the partisan nature, I'm curious what both of you think about having elected Secretary of States versus an appointed one or versus having a bipartisan board at the state level to take some of the partisanship out of it?
Gabriel Sterling: Bipartisan board at the state level taking partisanship out of it – let's just look at Wisconsin. I don't think that's happening.
Laughter
I don't think that's the best angle to do some of these things, and frankly, I know that there's these good government ideas, but I mean, Trey was an elected Republican Secretary of State, my boss is an elected Republican Secretary of State. I think it's a good shorthand for people to understand because you can do your job and step outside of the partisanship. I think Secretary Raffensperger definitely proved that, as do so many secretaries and elections officials around the country, I mean, another great example of an appointed one was Al Schmitt, who was a Republican Philadelphia Elections Commissioner who did his job, and now the Democrat Governor has appointed him Secretary of the Commonwealth, and I think it's better to hold people accountable. Appointed boards that are bipartisan or nonpartisan – I'm 53 years old, there's no such thing as a nonpartisan board. Everybody has their own proclivities, everybody has their own beliefs, there's, it's just, that's just the reality of it. So, I think being honest about it, and being able to hold people accountable is the important part of all these things. And this is probably from my old life of being a Republican elections guy for years, but I think elections hold people accountable and it's important to give the voters that accountability as they move forward, up and down the scale. I mean, in Georgia, we don't have elected clerks. We have, they're appointed normally by an elections board that is bipartisan, but generally reflects the partisanship of the county commissioners, and I do think the accountability is there in a partisan way. The idea of bipartisan boards are evenly matched. The Wisconsin legislature tried to say that a three-to-three vote was a majority. I was like, “that's not math,” that's not how this works. So, there are advantages and disadvantages to all these. I think we have a proven system of electing people in partisan races, and I think it works, and that’s my opinion on that.
Trey Grayson: So, you know what's funny – when I ran for the US Senate in 2010, my primary opponent had somebody file an ethics complaint to see if I had a conflict of interest of overseeing the election that I was running in. Now I overseen the election in 2007 when I got reelected, my predecessor had overseen the election in 1999 when he got reelected, and down the line. We didn't have succession before that, but the Secretary of State often ran for Treasurer or Auditor or Governor or something. So, it had happened, but nobody ever asked the question. Kentucky has an interesting setup where the State Board of Elections oversees the voter registration list. When I was in office, the Secretary of State was the chair. By custom [they] only voted in the case of a tie, but in practice could vote, and in practice, every vote was unanimous.
The Governor would appoint the six members – three Republicans, three Democrats from lists provided by the political parties. So, that meant you had like legit partisans on the board, and that, the Board was the one that certified the election results. I thought that was a nice system because it kept the Secretary of State out of the role of certifying election results. I had a vote just like anybody else, but it was a way to kind of build in some protections so you couldn't go rogue. And so, as a result of a system like that, when they the State Ethics Commission was asked, “Does Trey have a conflict of interest?” “Trey doesn't have any power.” The State Board certifies the votes, and, by the way, all they're doing is certifying the numbers that the locals give them, so he doesn't have the ability to influence that way. Yeah, there's a bully pulpit, but anyway, the answer was no, there's no conflict of interest, because there's no power. You know, I did have a bully pulpit, I could go to the legislature, I was the face for elections, and so, I thought that was a nice system because you kind of get a little bit of the best of both worlds – you got the accountability of an elected official, you have the partisanship is baked in and transparent, you know, everything had to take place in open meetings, and we still have a similar structure at the local level. There's a County Board of Elections with the County Clerk, the Sheriff and a Republican and a Democrat. And again, that puts, alleviates a little bit of the pressure from the clerk. In that case, the clerk breaks the tie. So that how that math works, Gabe. If it's two-two, the clerk’s, you know, it's like Animal Farm, some matter more than others, so two plus two, you know, you do get the extra vote if you're the clerk. But there is that level of accountability, and so, we've tried, that's how we tried to manage it in Kentucky.
I also said, “I'm not going to, I'm not going to campaign for county clerk's because I want to work with all of them – even the Republicans,” and they got mad at me, but I said, “I'm not going to do that because whoever wins I want to work with,” and so I didn't do that. And, but I was, you know, I was a delegate to the convention, people knew I was a Republican, and so, that was how I kind of balanced it. I just think that sometimes when you try to set up these nonpolitical structures, you end up burying the partisanship that's always going to be there and creating some of this friction, creating some of these extra bodies, you know, is, I think, the better way to handle some of this than some of the other reforms. There's also the practical matter of you have things in the Constitution and things like that, like, we're just gonna have this, and so how best to deal with it in reality, as opposed to, you know, Wisconsin is trying, again, to figure this out, like, even if the legislatures kind of run amok – and I think the Republicans legislature are mad because Trump didn't win and so, they're trying to change the system again for the second time – but like, what's the right outcome? And what's the right system? I think, look to the states that have figured out how to balance the having the elected official the energy in the executive – excuse the Federalist Papers language – with some tempering because we recognize that this is such an important duty, and so, I think there's ways to do it. Georgia has a similar structure, you'll have a State Board, you know, I know you don't like the fact that the Secretary is not the chair anymore, but you know, there's ways to do that, and that's what I would encourage other states to look at.
Brianna Lennon: Yeah, great. I think that’s great to end on.
Eric Fey: Great. Guys, thanks again for taking the time to join us. I know you're both on the road. Appreciate it, and good luck in 2024.
Gabriel Sterling: Thanks, y'all.
Trey Grayson: Thanks. Good luck to both of you, too.
Gabriel Sterling: Yeah, good luck out there. Stay safe.
Brianna Lennon: You've been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local election administration. I'm your host, Brianna Lennon, alongside Eric Fey. Thanks to KBIA for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Our Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.
