2009 Public Officials of the Year

Sam Reed

Q&A: Sam Reed

In 2004, Sam Reed (full profile) found himself caught in the middle of one of the closest elections in American history. In the race for governor of Washington State, Republican Dino Rossi held a 42-vote lead over Democrat Christine Gregoire. As Washington's Secretary of State, Reed was responsible for administering the election. He won praise for navigating the recount and court decisions that followed with a keen sense of fairness, and has since worked hard at correcting problems the election exposed. Governing Staff Writer John Buntin talked with Reed about what he was thinking during those difficult days in 2004, as well as his path into public service and his views on how politics has changed over the years. Here is an abridged and edited version of the interview:

What's your personal background?

I grew up in Wenatchee in Central Washington. A rather small community: 15,000, but about 40,000 people in the vicinity. I was profoundly influenced by my grandfather, after whom I'm named. I'm Sam Sumner Reed, and he was Sam Sumner Sr. He was an attorney, practiced law from 1905 to 1971. He was a member of the Washington state legislature. He was a prosecuting attorney. He was state chairman of the Republican Party back in the 1920s and just a very engaged person throughout his life, and he conveyed that to us. He also conveyed a deep sense of history and the importance of our Constitution. He was a real Lincoln scholar. He was really a profound influence on me in terms of getting into public service and public office.

What was your path to government service?

I was politically active from the time I was a youngster. In 1964, Dan Evans ran for governor, and Dan was like 38 years old. He was this bright, articulate, young legislator, who first was viewed as a kind of a dark horse candidate for governor but really had a vision for where the state ought to go. I got very enthusiastic about him, and I got deeply involved in his campaign. Later on, I went to graduate school in political science at Washington State University. I ended up coming over between the academic years and working here in Olympia. That went very well, so they invited me to come back.

I came back after getting my master's degree, to be the executive director of the governor's Urban Affairs Council, which was a temporary blue-ribbon commission convened to look at the direction Washington State ought to be moving in, in terms of our future urban policy. And that went well. The secretary of state, Lud Kramer, chaired that council. When a position opened in that office, I went to Kramer and said, "I have an idea who you ought to hire."

He said, "Who?" I said, "Me." He looked at me like, "What?" And then I explained why.

What was your pitch?

The secretary of state was the chief elections officer of the state. But the local governments, the county governments, really were the ones that carried out elections. So the secretary of state's office had played a rather passive role in terms of just kind of letting the counties do the work, get the numbers in, and the secretary of state's office would add them up and declare the winners and such. And so what I proposed was that we create an Electoral Reform Council, and we reexamine our election system, including campaign financing and all that.

That was one thing we ended up doing, and we ended up making some major reforms of our election system, including campaign contribution expenditure reporting, and setting up an agency, the Public Exposure Commission, to do it.

What were some of the lessons you learned about building coalitions?

I did learn very fundamental points that I've carried throughout my career, and a lot of them have been inspired by Dan Evans. One is that he had the courage to take on tough issues, even though in the short run he may have paid a political price for it. People were very unhappy with him, including his own party at times. In the long run, they were clearly what was best for the state. And he ended up in the long run getting a lot of respect and credit for doing it.

But also, we wouldn't start with the governor just kind of making an announcement, "Here's our public proposal for the legislative session and we're going to push this legislation." Instead, ahead of time, we would pull together what they now call the key stakeholders and key legislators on both side of the aisle, and say, "Here's what we view as the problem. Here's why we think it's important that we deal with it. Here's the general direction we're thinking we need to take to solve this problem. What do you think?" And then we would get, for one thing, some reality testing out of people who are being directly affected by it, but also from the legislators, getting a reading early on what it's going to take to get their support for this. And we ended up being very successful in terms of our proposed legislation.

How has the political climate changed since you first entered politics?

Most legislators used to be community leaders who rather generously and selflessly, in many respects, gave of their time to come here for a few months in the course of the year to adopt public policy for the state. And now, partly because of the amount of time it takes, because sessions are longer, committees are meeting between sessions, constituents expect so much more — there are very few people who are heads of their businesses, top lawyers in top firms, who actually can serve. So we're getting a different caliber of person.

The other thing we're getting is people who are doing it more as a matter of political ambition. Now, there have always been people like that, but I think it's much more common than it used to be. There are people who are doing it so they can stick it to the other party, which was quite rare back in those days. The congeniality was different. They would get in these big debates and really work one another over on the floor of the House or Senate and then go out and drink together and have fun and laugh in a congenial way. Now I see the Democrats go one direction and the Republicans go a different direction. I think that's unfortunate.

What followed your stint as assistant secretary of state?

Governor Evans then asked me to go over and work as the director of a constitutional reform commission because we, like many states, had this very long, very detailed constitution, which was written in 1889 and was inhibiting the state being able to be responsive to certain things. So I went over there and we proposed various ways of changing the constitution. And then after that, I ended up being appointed to fill a vacancy for the position of county auditor, which in this state is like what most states would call a county clerk. It has oversight of elections, it's a county recorder. In this state we have motor vehicle licensing, which is a little unusual. The county auditor also has the expenditure side of county government. It was a very, very interesting position, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I did it for 23 years.

Let's turn to your decision to run for secretary of state. What caused you to enter the fray?

I decided to do it because I'd worked closely with Ralph Munro, the previous secretary of state, and I was very aware of some things that needed to be focused on, where some leadership needed to be provided.

What were those things?

One of the biggest ones was the blanket primary. We'd had a primary election system in the state of Washington that had been taken to the U.S. Supreme Court because California had adopted it and they were immediately sued by the parties down there. In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. So we knew right away that we were going to have to have a new primary system for the state of Washington.

I had very strong convictions about the importance of people controlling their own election process and the people having the right and having the freedom to vote for whomever they wanted to vote for. I thought that was very important.

After Bush v. Gore, what was there any reassessment of the condition of Washington State's electoral system?

I felt like we were in pretty good shape. We had made changes that they hadn't made in Florida. For example, this is something I worked on with the county auditors' legislative committee; we created a certification and training program for election officials that trained all the county people. Then the secretary of state's office sent people out to conduct reviews, like audits, of their elections operations. And that really, I felt, was very helpful for us.

Turn to 2004, the close election between Democrat Christine Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi. What were you thinking at the time?

That I had been through a number of recounts as county auditor and knew exactly what needed to be done, and so I really wasn't very nervous about how we should go about this. I really kind of assumed while the votes would change a bit, it wouldn't reverse it or anything like that. And I felt that, through this certification-training program, the counties were well prepared to do this, and do it in a professional way. But what happened was it closed the gap down to just unbelievably narrow margin. I was just shocked. I just gasped. I couldn't believe it.

So the hand recount begins. Now, was it the discovery of this trove of 600-odd King County ballots that was really the moment of crisis or decision for you?

The first thing that happened was that I sent out a directive to the counties for the recount. And in it, I was very clear that what we're doing is recounting the ballots that had been counted the first time. We're not going back and re-examining all the ballots that were rejected for bad postmarks or signatures or other problems. We always made the stipulation, because this has been part of Washington State law, that if the counties had made a mistake then all right, we count those ballots. But we're not going to go back if the voters made a mistake and reconsider. But if the county made a mistake, that isn't fair to the voter. These voters voted with good intentions. Their vote ought to be counted.

Well, the Democrats sued me because they were behind. So they wanted us to go back and re-examine every envelope and signature and everything, and it went to state Supreme Court. And the Republicans actually ended up coming in supporting our position. And I prevailed, with a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court.

Right after that, I think, King County discovered this problem they had made in terms of transferring voter registrations over, and electronic signatures didn't transfer for a large number. That's where the 600 came from. Well, of course, now it looks like this could reverse the outcome of the election because King County was going 60-40 for Gregoire, so the Republicans sued me. And now we end up playing back, and really covering almost some of the same territory. It ended up in the Supreme Court again; I got a unanimous decision. And so first the Democrats were mad at me, now the Republicans were mad at me. So on we go.

What did Republicans at that point want you to do?

They were just sure that King County was cooking this up, that they were just manufacturing new ballots to try to change the outcome of the election because they knew how many votes they needed. But for one thing, I did have people up there observing them, on my staff. Secondly, I don't have the authority in the state of Washington — some secretaries of state do — to just go in and kind of take over or walk in the door and say, "Hey, I'm in charge here."

When you found yourself in a maelstrom of that sort, your advice would be to get out and tell your version of the story?

Yeah. We were very careful to communicate and to make sure that what my elections division was saying, what I was saying, what the assistant secretary of state was saying, what my press person was saying, that we were obviously saying the same thing. We were being totally transparent in terms of how we were doing this, why we were doing it this way, and what people should expect, in terms of the next steps and everything in the process.

Did the 2004 election expose real problems in terms of the voting process, and what have you changed?

Yes. And in 2005 I came in with a very comprehensive election reform package. As I told you in my answer to your question about Florida, we really thought that our system was very, very sound here. And what this showed, by putting the magnifying glass on it, was that we did have problems. For example, one of the first things I did as secretary of state, back in 2001 after Florida, was got a task force together to adopt rules to make sure that every county is counting the votes the same because obviously that was one of the Bush v. Gore points, that you can't have inconsistency between counties.

Well, in the past what had been required was each county to have a written policy on how to do this, but they didn't have to be the same. So anyway, I thought that by doing this and by adopting the rules, by training the elections people, we were accomplishing that.

It turns out that in fact, they still were being pretty darn subjective out there. And so we changed that to require that they put together not only a rigorous set of procedures but even pictures of what can be counted and what can't be counted. And that seems to have finally done it.

But that was a good example of what needed to be done. Plus, King County obviously needed to make substantial changes in how they were organizing their elections up there.

As you look to the challenges ahead, or just goals you would like to accomplish, what is the next step in improving the election process?

It's twofold. I continue to be concerned — I have been throughout my career — that we have too many citizens who aren't getting engaged in the process and getting engaged in the community. And part of that is for lack of adequate information. Who are these candidates? What are these issues and such? Or how do I do this? So, for my third term, I have set up a goal of civic engagement, going beyond just voting and moving more extensively into providing voter information to the citizens so that they will feel prepared.

So for example, we now have a program called My Vote where anybody in the state who is a registered voter can go in and enter their name and their birth date and up will come information on only the offices that person is eligible to vote in; legislators, county positions, city council, etc. And during election time, you can link over to voter's pamphlet statements on these people and search who the candidates are. And that is an example of the kind of thing I think is very important to do.

Do you think that there will eventually be Internet voting as a counterpart to voting by mail?

Yes I do.

When do you think that might happen?

I would say five to ten years. The Internet has to have the ability to make it more secure in terms of the possibility of hacking, jamming and manipulating, but also in terms of making sure it is the right person out there who is voting. Giving a PIN number I don't think is adequate for voting purposes, because they can be passed around. But I think in the future we will have retinal scans or fingerprints. There will be something like that that will be fairly common so that people will be able to make sure it is the right person voting.