The Mop-Up, with Gabe Sterling

Thank you for having us back in your inbox! This week, I spent a lot of time thinking, writing, and talking about H.R. 1 and what it means to try to reform our election process after 2020. My love for the 2005 Carter Baker Commission knows no bounds, but 15 years later we are no closer to bipartisan voting reforms. 

And then Andrew had a great question: What do these Republican state election officials who were forced to defend the integrity of their states’ processes from attacks by a Republican president think of federalizing—and standardizing—elections moving forward? 

And so he found one. And he asked. 

Gabe Sterling, as many of you will remember, is the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state. He became famous after a press conference in December—almost exactly a month before the deadly insurrection on January 6—in which he warned that “someone’s going to get killed” unless the president and Republican senators condemned efforts to convince Americans that the election had been stolen from President Trump. 

Here’s Andrew’s conversion with Gabe …

H.R. 1 is a super-sweeping bill, so it’s a little tough to know where to begin. I guess the best on-ramp would be, you were very involved in the work of running the 2020 election in Georgia. What are the provisions in H.R. 1 that are going to have the biggest impact if it’s passed on the work of state-level election officials?

Well, the main thing is, it’s basically stepping on what has historically and constitutionally been a state power forever. And our systems, as I said, the secretary said—we had a very functionally good election. We didn’t have long lines. We didn’t have widespread fraud—there’ll always be a little bit, because that’s just human beings, that does mean illegal voting, but a very small amount of it.

A lot of things they talk about doing: Basically it gets rid of voter ID, which we’ve had for years; it’s been very successful making in-person voting very secure. That seems pointless and backward-looking. They essentially go backwards on list maintenance, which means you have less secure lists, which then opens the door for fraud. We’ve just recently joined the Electronic Registration Information Center [a non-profit intended to help states maintain accurate voter rolls], which H.R. 1 says you cannot use in large swaths of time, anywhere from six months before a federal election, which is crazy. Because again, you’re trying to get your best lists.

It is an attack on states’ rights, on local election officials. It is correcting for things that didn’t actually happen from 2018, but it’s a perception that it did. It’s highly partisan: It takes the FEC, changes its role drastically from sort of a nonpartisan watchdog to a partisan thing which is accountable to a president, be they Republican or Democrat. I mean, it is a hodgepodge, a wish list of things to make elections less secure and federalize systems.

And one of the big things for me is, we have 50 different state election systems that are run by multiple jurisdictions in those states. And that’s a very good security hedge against outside actors and inside actors who might want to affect those elections. Because you have so many different ways elections are run, it makes it more difficult to find a single point of entry to mess with things. So H.R. 1 is a highly partisan, egregious bill that is not really addressing the reality of what elections and what election issues are in the United States.

During the 2020 election cycle, we saw a lot of states change up some of their rules ahead of the election in order to accommodate pandemic voting. We saw that in Georgia, a number of places. What’s the utility of having states be the ones to make these kinds of decisions rather than having a one-size-fits-all policy?

One size fits all very rarely works in any instance, especially when it comes to this. We leave a lot of decisions to our locals where we can, because they understand what their citizens need and what they’re gonna do. As an example, some counties need to discuss that they need to have a lot more polling locations—like in [Georgia’s most populous county] Fulton, for instance. But Lumpkin County, in north Georgia, they’ve got one giant precinct, and it works great for them, because they’re used to it, and they’ve made it work.

If we had to do a situation where the federal law said, you have to do this for this many people at this time—it’s just not going to fit. These counties are very differently resourced, and they have to address things very differently given the circumstances at times. So we’re even trying to give our locals in some cases more autonomy around how they deploy election machinery. Because right now we have a one-size-fits-all policy that’s dumb. They have to deploy one BMD [ballot marking device] for every 250 voters in the voter rolls that are active, no matter the election—it could be a special election when you know like 4 percent of the people are gonna show up, but you still have to pretend like it’s the presidential. It’s just bad public policy to have a one-size-fits-all thing, especially when it comes to voting.

One other thing that happens with this that’s very difficult to do, H.R. 1 can only affect federal elections. So that means you’re going to have multiple voter registration deadlines potentially. You’re going to have rules around runoffs that federal law doesn’t like, that states have. There’s lots of unintended consequences—because one of my big things is, this wasn’t written by talking to elections officials. This was politicians talking to other politicians and academics. And they don’t actually have to administer actual elections on the ground. That’s not what they do.

Like in Georgia right now, our voter registration deadlines are different than the ones for federal elections if there’s a runoff. So if there’s a state runoff election, you’d have to maintain a different voter list, which you simply can’t do—it becomes impossible to administer. Because you have to be eligible to vote in the previous general election. Whereas in the federal rules, it’s a whole new election … With our automatic voter registration system, there’s people who, just because they got drivers’ licenses, will be eligible to vote in the federal election, but not in the state election on the same ballot. Which makes it nearly impossible to administer or follow the laws properly.

On the flip side of that coin, some House Republicans have introduced a bill of their own which would also mandate many federal election standards, just in the opposite direction: implementing universal voter ID, nationwide banning of automatic voter registration, requiring states to have pretty stringent voter registration documentation requirements. Do these sorts of federal GOP proposals run into the same constitutional issues related to federalism and a top-down approach?

It depends what they are, and I’m not familiar with it, so I don’t want to comment too much—some things you can put in there and mandate and it would make some sense. In general, states should be allowed to run their elections—that’s my general statement.

Obviously you’re not alone in the Republican Party in thinking H.R. 1 is a pretty disastrous bill. But some of the arguments we’ve seen from prominent Republicans have tied these arguments against the bill to this belief that mass fraud took place in the 2020 election and threw the result to Biden. Do you think tying this argument that H.R. 1 is an unconstitutional and bad bill to these claims of mass voter fraud last time around makes it harder to make the argument against the policies in the bill?

Well, the issue you run into is, some of the stuff that’s in this would allow for the claims that were made about voter fraud to come to reality much more easily. And that’s where you run into that issue; that might be why they’re tying it. We know there wasn’t a lot of widespread voter fraud—but of course, this bill wasn’t in place! If it was, you could see a lot more of that.

One of the big ones to me is ballot harvesting—that just seems immoral on its face to me. … You hear stories about this at the local level where, you know, after the absentee ballot, big bright yellow envelope, shows up at your door—all of a sudden you get a knock, the sheriff could be there to help you fill out your absentee ballot, you know? Those are the kind of things where if you allow the ballot harvesting … that just seems cuckoo crazy town to me. That you’d allow, ‘hey, this is how many votes we need, let’s go get them!’ As if that just doesn’t make any sense at all. So we made ballot harvesting illegal, whereas that’s a key point in H.R. 1.

At the same time, we’ve seen Democrats saying that one of the reasons these reforms are so necessary is to restore America’s faith in democracy after the 2020 election. But at the end of the day, didn’t the state-run 2020 election hold up pretty well given that the president and huge swaths of his party were trying to influence the result?

One, H.R. 1 was a reaction to the untruths told about, in large part, the Georgia election in 2018. So you want to talk about people reacting to that—H.R. 1 isn’t new. They proposed this before the 2020 election, so it’s kind of hard to say it’s a reaction to that. … The claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020 were untrue. The claims of widespread voter suppression—of voter suppression, period—in 2018 were untrue. The claims that Russians hacked voting machines and flipped votes from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump were untrue. We can’t be making public policy based on essentially lie after lie after lie that had been done for partisan reasons.

What should Republicans want from voting reforms around the country? What’s the endgame?

I think—within states, again, this is within states—uniformity. I think if states did what Georgia did: We have online voter registration, we have automatic voter registration, we have three weeks of early voting. In-person voting with an ID is the most secure way to vote—period, end of story, everybody knows that. And there’s been zero evidence that voter ID is an obstacle for anyone to vote, especially in a state like Georgia where you can get a free ID if you need one. It is very easy to register to vote in this state, it is very easy to vote in this state, and it’s very difficult to cheat with the guardrails we’ve put up. You want to have common-sense guardrails, you want to have your local election officials be given some autonomy on how they run their polling location, and you want to have a lot of transparency. Transparency is one of the biggest hallmarks we need to have. All of the processes need to be viewed in public. Audits ought to be something we really focus on, where the paper ballots are available. Really focus on audits, statewide audits, and then randomized audits of local elections would probably be another great thing to have. Transparency and auditability are two hallmarks just to make people feel more confident in the outcomes of their elections.

And then security based around the absentee ballot. In Georgia, one of the things Sec. Raffensperger supports—and it’s easier to do in Georgia than it is in other states, because like I said, in our voter registration files, 97 percent of those files have a driver’s license attached to it—requesting an absentee ballot and sending it in without a signature. A signature is a subjective thing. Trying to get to where there’s objective measurements that are easier for our county elections officials to train and execute. It’s easier to train the $10-an-hour temp employee to say, does this number match this number, than does this loop on the beginning of a cursive thing—now being done less with ink and pen and more on a digital pad—match this other one you’re now seeing with ink and pen? That’s a much harder thing to train somebody to do; it’s up to the subjectivity of those people. So if you move to a binary, objective—does this number match? Yes: Send them their absentee ballot. Does this number match? Yes: Count that absentee ballot. It’s moving to things that make it easier for election administration officials, adds transparency, and puts the auditability in at the back end to show that the ballots cast actually were counted as they were cast. All of those things combined are the kind of reforms that I think Republicans would like to see, and have it be executed at the state and local level.

Then the corollary question is, if all that is taking place at the state and local level, is there a role the federal government ought to be playing beyond just getting out of their way?

The EAC is there, and they provide a baseline of what election equipment should look like to be safe. They should help provide, at the DHS level, through CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], that sort of umbrella of training and security for the cyber side that many states on their own may not be able to do. Because if there’s international actors, that’s a specific role for the federal government to be in. They provide Albert sensors right now, which is fine if there’s an intrusion attempt. So they do a lot of those kind of things. They help do tabletop exercises for cybersecurity. So there’s a large role on the overall security side that I think they can do. And then continuing to have the HAVA money available to those counties and localities that don’t have the resources to do a lot of those kind of things: Those can be helpful roles to come in alongside the states and counties, to help them execute safe elections.