S4E7 – Voting at Home with Barbara Smith Warner
In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Barbara Smith Warner, the current executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, a national organization working to “increase voters’ access to, use of and confidence in voting at home.”
They spoke about how local election administrators can best work to inform state legislators about election administration, as well as about the resources the National Vote at Home Institute has for election administrators across the country – both those in universal vote from home states and those in states with more limits on ballot access.
High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits:
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson
Transcription of the episode is as follows:
Barbara Smith Warner: One of the things I like to tell people is that the thing about voting at home, it increases turnout. It doesn't actually increase turnout for one side or another. It just increases turnout. And nobody wants to hear that, but it's still true. So, the more you can do to continue to remind people and to get people back to the time when voting, in and of itself, was a neutral good that everybody could believe in, I think the better off you're going to
[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]
Brianna Lennon: Welcome back to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. I'm Brianna Lennon, the County Clerk in Boone County, Missouri, and with me is my co-host –
Eric Fey: Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, Missouri.
Brianna Lennon: And today, we're really excited to have the executive director of the Vote at Home Institute, and you can introduce yourself –
Barbara Smith Warner: Well, thank you very much. My name is Barbara Smith Warner. I'm currently the executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, and I am coming to you from Portland, Oregon.
Brianna Lennon: Awesome. So, we're excited to talk about the work that you do and how you got to there. So, in the, as is our tradition, how did you, specifically, end up working in elections, in your trajectory to where you're working now?
Barbara Smith Warner: Right. It's funny, because I work in elections and have for most of my adult life, but in a very different way than you guys. I actually came into the election space through working on campaigns. I started out after college in Washington DC, working on the hill and then working for a couple different labor unions, doing legislative and political education for members, and through that, I ended up working on a bunch of different campaigns based in DC, but ended up working on campaigns in all different parts of the country – including time after time in the state of Oregon. Where, throughout the 90s, there were all sorts of ballot measures going on here that the numerous unions that I was working for were very interested in either supporting or defeating. So, I ended up getting sent out to work on a bunch of campaigns in Oregon, and eventually moved out here.
The specific job I came out to do was to be the campaign director for the Oregon House Democratic Caucus, which is kind of like an uber manager that oversees all of the Democratic candidates that run for all of the State House seats. Oddly enough, 15 years later, after doing another couple campaigns, staying home with my kids for a number of years, I ended up getting appointed and then elected to the legislature, and I was then the majority leader who ran that same caucus that I was the campaign director for 15 years earlier, which was really interesting circularity. But then in even greater circularity, I served nine years in the legislature – had a great time, did lots of great policy work. I was the chair of the rules committee for a number of years, and that's where our election work is, so that's really when I started to become exposed to the elections world from the other side, right? Getting to meet with folks in the Secretary of State's office, county clerks, all of that interesting work that exposed me to that, and then when I was done being a legislator, which I decided after nine years, that I just was, that I had a great time, and it's time to do something else – I discovered the National Vote at Home Institute, which works to increase voters access to, use of and confidence in voting at home with mailed out ballots.
And the circularity of it was back in the 90s, when I was still in DC and got sent out to Oregon for one of the elections – it was, the first thing I did was to work with Phil Keisling, the Secretary of State in Oregon, at the time, I was working for the letter carriers, and we worked with him to do a bunch of public service announcements about the first federal statewide election that was run in the state of Oregon, in the fall of ‘95 and the winter of ‘96, it was to replace a guy named Bob Ackwood who had resigned, and so, in the primary, I worked with the Secretary of State, connecting him with letter carriers to do public service announcements about this great new thing that Oregon was doing called “vote by mail,” at the time, or referred to as “vote by mail,” and then I ended up coming out and working on that campaign in the general.
So, again, 25 years later, I'm ready to do something else and discover this organization that was founded by that very same Phil Keasling. So, and my letter carrier background made me a big believer in mail ballots. It's really, it's quite amazing to me, when I take time to think about it, how I've been able to come back and do this thing that brings in so many things that I care about and support – mail ballots, democracy, making voting voter centric, as easy as possible. Because my biggest thing, I'll say, is, the thing about democracy is, if the foundation is voting, then voting should be as easy as possible, and there are few things more convenient and yet also safe and secure than sending every active registered ballot or voter a ballot.
Eric Fey: So, tell us a little bit about – we'll get into more of the nitty gritty of the National Vote at Home Institute, but I'm curious in your transition from all of the legislative and policy and campaign work you've done, when coming over to the Vote at Home Institute, were there some blind spots you had – for lack of a better word – that you had to kind of bone up on some some areas, or did it translate very well and you were kind of off to the races?
Barbara Smith Warner: I'd say both. It's a great question, and the answer is – I experienced both of those things. The biggest thing I would say is, like one year into this job, I went to the Oregon State Clerk's annual meeting, and I said to them, I said, “You guys, you have got to engage more with the legislators” because I will tell you, I was the Rules committee chair, and I've worked in campaigns, and I've learned so much in my first year at the National Vote at Home Institute about how election offices run. It's a very different thing to know how campaigns run, and even to be making laws, and then indeed, to just learn all the backstory and all the administrative work and all of that that goes into it. And how many things that legislators will have a great idea about how they think elections should be run that misses an enormous bunch of information about how it actually works on the ground in those election offices.
So, I would say, the short answer is, the biggest thing I learned was how much I didn't know about elections. Overall, specifically when I started, I didn't realize there were eight states and DC that were fully vote at home, that were universal vote at home states. So, like, the more time I spend, the more I learn – and though, I think the most important thing I learned was how important it is to really get in and engage with election administrators to know how it works, that you can think you understand and know as much as you want to, but the truth is until you have, at a minimum, talked to them, gone on a tour, volunteered, you know, to watch ballot counting, volunteered on an election day as a poll worker, whatever it is – that is just critical for that connection to be made between the people who are making the laws and sometimes the rules about how this stuff works, and the people who are having to administer it.
Brianna Lennon: I think jumping off of that. What kind of connections have you made with local election officials to kind of bridge that gap, or advice that you've given to local election officials about how to get in touch with or convincingly try to get election officials, because, you know, it is, it is difficult to, there's a lot they're being pulled in a lot of different directions – legislators are, and getting them to want to come engage can be difficult. So, do you have any advice on that?
Barbara Smith Warner: I've got lots of advice. The first thing is just to reach out and do it. I mean, I know that in Oregon, we are technically a citizen legislature, right? We meet for six months in one year and six weeks in the other and whether it's Texas that has 160 day session in a two year cycle or Massachusetts where they meet year round, year after year. The truth is, all of those legislators still care very much about elections and how they're run, and many clerks, I find, are, they, kind of, they cut themselves off before they try. They're like, “Oh, they're gonna be too busy, or they're not gonna be interested in this.” Well, start at the beginning, start with the people who are on the committees that specifically deal with election stuff, but even if they're not, you would be surprised how far an invitation from a local election administrator will go with those legislators. You know, you got to frame it in a way. It's like anything, you know, appeal to their self interest, you know, “I know that you're interested in making sure that we have the most secure elections, and could we, you know, give you a tour and show you how it works.” Whatever it is. Give them an award to get them to come to your annual meetings, right? Maybe even as, you know, as crass as that. But generally, my advice is, try it. Because you'd be surprised how open most of these folks are. I don't care what side they're on or what bills they're on, you would be surprised how willing and interested they are in learning more, and, as a side note to that, if the member can't come talk to their staff and educate their staff because also – whether it's a citizen legislature or professional or whatever it is – they all have staff of some sort, and if the staff understands what you do as an election administrator, that's going to go a long way towards – either you're going to have the staff there as an advocate because they've come in and understood, or the staff's going to say, “Wow, this is really cool. My boss should come and learn about this.” So, that's it. That's the other thing – is reach out to the member, find ways to do it and focus on staff, as well, because you can really get a long way by engaging with staff.
Eric Fey: Since we're on this topic of legislative advocacy, for lack of a better term – and I know we'll get to vote at home stuff – but since you've got a lot of experience in this field, one question I've asked on a couple of occasions has to do with the experiences I've heard of election administrators going to legislators and talking to them about certain election administration policies that are proposed or in the works, and quite often, the legislator will – and it can be said or unsaid – their first concern will be, “How will it impact my base or the other party's supporters or the voters that will support me?” And the question I've had for some legislators is, should election officials approach them and say, just right off the bat, “Look, the evidence shows this, this won't impact your people,” or “it won't hurt the or, you know what, your opponent, it's going to be bad for them, but it's going to be good for your people.” I mean, should election administrators go down that road, or should we just stay very non- partisan, and, you know, this is the policy, and this is how it's going to affect election administration. I'm not going to talk about how it's going to affect turnout or voters on one side or the other.
Barbara Smith Warner: Yeah, that's a tough question. I mean, I think the instinct, and really the best place to start is always from neutrality, right? Because, and that's part of why it's better, if you can, to get them to you rather than you going to the legislator, right? Obviously, you know, you might do some meetings in their office during session, but ideally getting them to your office so they can see your process – that's just going to help to establish and really get them to understand that this is a neutral operation. That in its, you know, inherent self is neutral, right? It works this way because it works this way for everybody. I think that's always going to be the better way to do it because, quite honestly, you know, you could tell both sides that this is going to help them and harm their opponents, and, you know, you're just, it's a risky thing, right? I mean, I worry so much – it's interesting because we were founded by Phil Keasling, former Secretary of State of Oregon, you know, a high level election administrator himself. That's certainly who he connects with, and so, he's always been very focused, and we, over the years, have had many election administrators who have been advocates for making progress towards greater access to vote at home. We are also in a situation where, for the last five plus years, local election administrators have had not only their jobs, but their lives threatened, you know, more often than I would even like to think about, let alone talk about. So, the truth is, we try to, you know, we have – I'll talk about this a little later – we have an online community for local election administrators about mail ballot specific things, and we like to be able to give them kind of a safe space to have those conversations, share resources, and indeed, election administrators are always great advocates for us, and yet we have found ourselves hesitating over the last couple of years to ask people to put themselves out that way because of that. So, I don't, you know, my main answer is still, the more you can do to demonstrate how the process is the process and it is a neutral thing. One of the things I like to tell people is that the thing about voting at home, it increases turnout. It doesn't actually increase turnout for one side or another. It just increases turnout. And nobody wants to hear that, but it's still true, so the more you can do to continue to remind people and to get people back. Of the time when voting, in and of itself, was a neutral good that everybody could believe in, I think the better off you're going to be.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]
Eric Fey: You have a background, as you've mentioned, working with the letter carriers and the National Vote at Home Institute, obviously, has to understand and work with postal regulations and mail ballot regulations. From where I sit, and I have mentioned this to postal service folks that come to election conferences, that it seems like there is, amongst regular voters, somewhat of a crisis of confidence in the Postal Service. And I don't know, you know, if there's an answer to how to overcome that. I'm curious from where you sit, are you experiencing that at kind of a nationwide, your nationwide viewpoint? And from your historical perspective with the Postal Service, you know – where is the pendulum, I guess is my question?
Barbara Smith Warner: Yeah, no, it's a great, it's a great point, and you're spot on. The truth is that there has been a crisis of confidence, and it's a combination of actual experience and what's going on, and a little bit of big lie thrown in, you know, sprinkled in for, you know, for flavor and to exacerbate it. But here's the thing to remember, is that you have to acknowledge the structure of the Postal Service – how it was set up and how it used to serve in our country, in our economy, straight up, and where it is now. Like you used to have two or three mail deliveries a day. That's how critical the Postal Service was to the functioning of our country and our economy. It was, you know, bills and medicine and invoices and how you paid your rent and legal notices had to be delivered that way. There were all sorts of things. And so, the Postal Service was structured in a way so that they could provide that same service to every freaking door in this country for the same cost. That requires a big bunch of infrastructure, and it also assumes a pretty high volume of mail. The truth – and then you've got the last 50 years, right? Even, you know, even before that as the internet wrapped up or ramped up and increased that, even before that, you started having changes. But now when – if you think about all the things that used to happen through the mail that just plain don't anymore, right? When was the last time you mailed a check to pay a bill? It's probably been a while. When was the last time you received a legal notification through the mail? Probably not. You probably got it on your email, right? So the truth is, you have this structure that was set up with buildings and infrastructure and staff to do this huge volume of really critical mail, and that volume has dropped like a stone.
There are still really important things that it does. It is still a very valuable service, you know, lots of people still do get medicine by the mail, and it is structured in a way that it's more capacity than it needs, and so, as it's trying to figure out ways to scale down to right size itself, it also it is impacting the way the mail gets received and delivered and processed. So, it's a combination of that as a really big structural issue with the Postal Service that they've been dealing with and acknowledging and working very hard to figure out. And layer on top of that, the big lie, right? “Oh, people,” you know, “Oh, the Postal Service throws away ballots, or they take them, and then they photocopy them, and then, you know, return them all.” Just, you know, ridiculous stuff that you hear.
So, number one – it is no small part of why we call ourselves the National Vote at Home Institute. We talk about voting at home, you know, I still say vote by mail regularly because lots of people think of it by that, but the truth is – if you think about how it works, the ballots get mailed out, but even looking in the states that are universal vote at home, most people in those states don't mail it back. The mailing it out is still really important, but in Oregon – just in Oregon, like two thirds of voters bring it back in person to election offices or to ballot drop boxes. So, it's acknowledging that. Also, you know, full disclosure, it's because we want to remind people of the focus on what you're doing is, you're voting in the safety and security of your own home, where you can get lots of information. You know, there's lots, we have all sorts of cool statistics about how much more down ballot voting there is when you vote at home, right? Because it's literally sitting like I am now at my dining room table, and I'm like, “Oh, East Multnomah, soil and water. Who are those three people?” And I can look them up and make an informed decision.
But back to the Postal Service, yeah, it is a combination of – there are challenges, right? And yet the basic structure is sound, you know, we are supportive, you know, I don't think anybody wants the Postal Service to go away, and so, it is acknowledging that challenge that you know, that's why you have grace periods on receiving those ballots. I mean, Postal Service employees, letter carriers, when I worked at letter carriers, and I know it's still true today, they were the most trusted government employees, period, because they're the people you see everyday that come to your house, they bring you your stuff, they check on whether you're okay. They're a really important part of how we still function as a country.
Brianna Lennon: I guess Institute viewed or you personally viewed – when there are arguments specifically about voting at home that come up, or there are, you know, we always hate to see when a county clerk does something that they shouldn't do, and then they get in trouble for it, and we have to, you know, not necessarily defend them, but at least hear about what happened. And, you know, that hurts. I think the overall reputation of the offices. How have there been responses when there have been instances of abuse of the system, or somebody doing what they were not supposed to do, how [have you] reacted to those things?
Barbara Smith Warner: Yeah. I mean, it's like you said, you know, it's always going to happen, and the important things are, is – people generally get caught. Number one. And that's important. And number two, what it does is it teaches us every time about, “Okay, are there weak spots,” right? “And what can we do to improve them and do best practices?”
I mean, I'll give us an example in Connecticut. In the last couple years, they've been a series of things that have happened in Bridgeport about ballot harvesting and other things. Well, here's what you don't hear about that – is that all those so called “violations” there are because they have really weird rules about who can collect ballots and return ballots, and most of the violations are someone returning, you know, one person filled out the form and got the absentee ballots, then brought them to somebody else, and then somebody else, and then somebody else returned them, and not the person who got the form originally. You know, I'm not totally writing off what has happened there, but a lot of it is violations of rules that are just about how they're returned, what boxes they go to, who is returning them. There is, you know, there are little to no allegations of actual fraud with the voting or the ballots. It's just because Connecticut had these oddly specific rules about ballot return. So, we are engaged there right now. So, the good news is, Connecticut passed a constitutional amendment last year to allow no excuse absentee voting, voting at home, and so, now we are working with them. “Okay, now Legislature as you're going to implement that, why don't you take a look at these rules and restructure them to best practices,” right? We have a lot of best practices about ballot returns, about ballot tracking – ballot tracking is a huge part of this because it's another reason why people discover when there is fraud or bad things happen, it is usually discovered through ballot tracking because somebody gets a notification that their ballot has been turned in, and they're like, “What? I didn't get a mail ballot” or, you know, however it comes out.
Brianna Lennon: We probably only can kind of fit in, like one more thing, and I wanted to make sure that whatever that one more thing was, was something that you wanted to cover? So, was there anything that you wish that we had asked?
Barbara Smith Warner: Yeah, I would just like to make sure – particularly your listeners – know about, really, the two foundations of what we do organizationally. And one, I mentioned, it's the Vote at Home Hub. It's an online community for local and state election administrators. Where it's, we do a monthly webinar that they're free to join where we have panelists who are election administrators themselves, and they talk about mail ballot specific things. It's, you know, it's great. It's very, kind of, easy conversation, lots of Q&A opportunities, and that is kind of how we drive people to know about what we do, election administrators in particular.
And then as part of that, or after that, once we've gotten you hooked by coming to the webinar, hopefully you'll join our hub, our election administrator, our EO hub, or our vote at home hub. And that is an online community – I think of it like a combination of Reddit and LinkedIn because it's specifically only for current, and we let a few retired election administrators in, but we are very picky about that. We hand curate and make sure that everybody who gets in is, you know, actually one of us. And the idea is that it’s a space where you can ask questions of people, we sometimes do surveys saying, “Hey, what do you want to hear about on a webinar?” We will share resources there, you know, “Hey, here's that,” you know, King County will say, “Here's the emergency communications plan that we came up with,” you know, “for what after we,” you know, “after we got envelopes with ricin in it,” you know, “poison or whatever in it.” So, it's an online community. It's a private safe space of only other election administrators that we really want to keep supporting those local election administrators because, indeed, you guys have been under threat, under pressure in a lot of different ways for the last five years and more.
And then, just other ways – just to know that we do work in every state, to meet every state where it's at, and do what we can to increase voters’ access to use of and confidence in voting at home. So, broadly, you know, whether you're a universal vote at home state that everyone gets automatically sent a ballot, or you're an excuse required state where you need a specific legal excuse, or one in the middle where there's no excuse needed, but maybe you have to apply every time. We work with every state to just increase that access. We're not, you know, we're realistic. We know we're not going to turn Mississippi into a universal vote at home state, but what we can do is work on making progress on postage paid ballots, so they go back easier, you know, fighting back against ballot drop box bans, which are, you know – boy, the only thing worse than not being able to send it through the mail is banning drop boxes in the meantime to make it even harder. So, we really do, we are interested, if you have an idea about a way that you think that voting at home can be easier or more productive or better utilized in your state – reach out to us, and we'd be happy to work with you. We have model language. We've got best practices, all sorts of good stuff like that.
Eric Fey: You've been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I'm your host, Eric Fey alongside Brianna Lennon. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.
