In addition to job titles, Secretaries of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas of Vermont and Scott Schwab of Kansas share a July 9 birthday and the distinction of having served in their state’s legislatures before taking statewide office.
“A lot of the secretaries haven’t spent time in the legislature, and it’s nice to have those conversations with folks who go from the making-policy side to the executing-policy side,” says Schwab, a Republican who served 10 years in the Kansas Legislature, including two years as speaker pro tem, before being elected to his current office in 2018.
Their states have taken different paths to the goal of free, fair and secure elections, as they explained during a session at NCSL’s Legislative Summit.
“We do universal vote-by-mail,” says Hanzas, a Democrat who served in the Vermont House of Representatives from January 2005 to this January, when she became the state’s top election official.
“It was something we did in an emergency in 2020. With the pandemic raging, we recognized our little retired school teachers and the retired postmasters who work our elections were not the population we wanted to sit in front of lines and lines of people in order to conduct an in-person election.”
With more than 300 different ballot designs statewide, it was a “massive scramble,” she says. “It was very popular. We had 74% voter turnout, more than any in (state) history. We made it permanent in 2021. We did a poll and 68% supported it.”
About a third of Kansas voters cast their ballots by mail, Schwab says.
“Ballot harvesting started in 1863. We would send ballots to our soldiers fighting for the Union cause and their commanders would collect all the ballots to return them to the proper counties to be processed and counted,” he says.
“Our idea of ballot fraud is Missouri coming to Kansas to kill our poll workers so we couldn’t have an election. That’s how we started as a state.”
Policies Shaped by the Past
Even during the pandemic, Kansas was 66% in-person voting, and Schwab counseled states with similar situations to think carefully before changing.
“Unless you’re 68% vote by mail, don’t do it,” he says. “It’s going to be interpreted as voter suppression. You don’t want that kind of disruption. Other states because of history, culture, sometimes terrain, mail ballots just makes more sense to them. In Kansas, you can vote early mail, early in person or in person on Election Day. We don’t want to add to that or take away from it because it just creates confusion.”
Hanzas hired a civic and education coordinator to help implement a program of different voter outreach activities that she says “is going to be very helpful in helping Vermonters engage in the electoral process. Vermont is creating a voter guide to be mailed to each voter 45 days before an election with a definition of each office.”
“Kansas history is we don’t (send a voter guide),” Schwab says. “As Republicans, we want voters to be informed, too, but you’re going to pay for it, we’re not. If you’re not in an overwhelmingly vote-by-mail state, we don’t see why we should be sending what we would call campaign material to the voter.”
Schwab says he survived a nasty primary in which he “campaigned on keeping the drop boxes because I don’t trust the post office. Our rural communities really appreciated that. While I’m very conservative, I’m also pragmatic. Our clerks explained to people that no matter what you see on cable TV, we’re secure. I’m proud of our clerks on that front.”
Mark Wolf is a senior editor at NCSL.