Ballot drop boxes open in Washington

Well, the voter pamphlets are out, ballots are in mailboxes, and drop boxes are open now. It is election time, and we're joined now by Washington's Secretary of State, Steve Hobbs, to talk about how to make your vote count and some of the concerns surrounding this election. Steve, good morning to you. Good morning. Okay, let's talk about something really serious to begin with, because you've been speaking about this. Washington election offices have been sent mysterious packages containing white powder. Now, these packages and letters have been sent across the country to election offices and elected officials. And for me, this harkens back to the anthrax letters that were sent to lawmakers and news outlets back in 2001, killed five people. What did these packages actually contain? What do you know? So don't forget, we actually had white powder mailed to us in 2023 to several counties in the state of Washington. And we did receive one, of course, Pramila Jayapal, I believe, and then Adam Smith received one. I have not gotten the results back on what the substance is. We just know that this letter was intercepted, luckily, before it actually hit the elections office. Gotcha. But as far as we know, there are no injuries reported related to this. But what do we know about where they came from and who might be behind this? we don't know where they came from i want to say who who actually sent them right and i haven't heard anything whether this person is connected to the person in 2023 because as you recall we never caught that person as well when those letters were sent in 2023 that was with fentanyl and that was sent to about three or four counties in this state and then working with the fbi and USPS, we were able to intercept, when I say we, I mean the government, the federal government helped the state intercepted the letters before they got to Nevada, California, Arizona, and Georgia. And so there's some indication that some of these letters came through a post office in Texas. What do you think is the purpose of doing something like this? It's to cause confusion and chaos and fear. I mean, our rank and file workers, they don't... know, they didn't come to a work environment expected to be harmed and this causes a lot of concern. And I hope that people watching this right now realize the dangers that our election workers face not just here but across the United States because of this small group of individuals in the United States that are election deniers and think that elections are fraudulent. These are hardworking men and women that just want to make sure these elections are ran secure and accessible and transparent. So have you or your staff personally dealt with any external pressure from the feds in the run up to this election? We've had as you've even reported the multiple lawsuits that have occurred threatening letters saying that I can be charged with criminal activity. I know several of my colleagues have received notice that there will be DOJ observers coming out to look at the elections. And so I wouldn't surprise me if they're coming to Washington State since they're hitting most of the states across the United States. We saw a malicious act against a ballot box in Clark County a couple years ago. Election security, as you mentioned, has been top of mind during this election. The Trump administration also hinting at armed forces at polling places, which is illegal. So how mindful are you and your team about voter intimidation in this election? Yeah, we've been hypervigilant about that. That's why over the course of the last year, we've done multiple tabletop exercises. We have tried to come up and war game, if you will, like what the new threat could be. You know, the ballot box getting hit, that was not expected, right? And so we gotta constantly think what could be the next thing that we could be hit with. We learned a lot from that ballot box incident. That's why many of the ballot boxes, more ballot boxes have cameras on them. They have sensors on them. A lot of ballot boxes have sensors where the county will be notified if there's a temperature spike where the ballot box is actually moved. And specialized extinguishers that could put out the fire that happened in Clark County that was a different type of fire was done by thermite which you cannot be extinguished by normal extinguishers. Okay so less than two weeks until the midterms now ballots in the mail Election Day coming up November 3rd you are urging people to mail the ballots early this year so how early should people turn them in and and why the change this year in terms of mail-in voting and getting them in or even earlier? Right because the US Postal Service did cost-saving measures I'm to use air quote cost saving measures to save money. And that simply means is that the postmark will be done at their central processing facilities. So it could be anywhere from three days to five days and sometimes seven days. That's why we've been urging voters, Washingtonians out there, mail your ballot early. If you're within seven days of the election, just take it to a drop box. We have already noticed because we've been putting the word about early voting that we've seen a slight uptick in the number of ballots we are receiving now. Last night, we got like above 6% ballots received of the total ballots sent out. And that is a 1.4% increase from four years ago. Good nonpartisan folks like yourself run elections in each individual state. Now, the Trump administration continues to talk about rigged elections and talking about how the Democrats cheat. And you have repeatedly told us that intentional voter fraud is incredibly rare. How rare and how would somebody actually go about rigging an election? So, yeah, let me give you some of the numbers. If we go back 20 years ago until now, you have about 90 million votes that have been cast and only five cases of voter fraud. If we go back to 1982 till 2025, only 15 cases of non-citizens voting. So that's 0.0000006%. It would be very hard for anyone to rig the election because the way elections are designed here in the state of Washington and other states is that the local municipalities run the election. So if someone would have to find a way to come up with something, I guess, to change the numbers in all 39 counties, and that'd be pretty hard to do. And there's so many checks. We have audits that happen before and after the election. We have a full blown audit of all the counties. Once every five years, we test the tabulation machines. And of course, we've got databases to talk to other databases so we know when people register in another state, vote in the same election, or even when they pass away. Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, thank you so much for your time this morning. We appreciate it. Thank you very much. And again, Election Day coming up on November.