Name: ワシントン州長官、郵便で選挙を議論 (Washington secretary of state discusses elections by mail)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:47:55.000Z
Duration: 5 min 23 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Of course, the criminal virus has changed.

When many of us voted, more than a dozen states have postponed their primaries.

It's also changed how some of us want to vote.

We turn now to Washington State, one of only five states in the country that conduct selections entirely by mail.

It's a form of social distance democracy that's gaining appeal.

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman joins us now.

Thank you so much, Secretary Wyman, for joining us.

So Washington got rid of in person voting long before the Corona virus struck.

Tell us why your state moved to an all male in election and what benefits you've seen.

Well, we evolved over about 15 years to vote by mail first, giving permanent absentee status to voters and then allowing counties to do it individually.

But it still took us about five years to ramp up to complete vote by mail.

And our state's been doing it since 2010 s.

So we're really ready for the this cove in 19 attack, if you will.

Seeing images of Wisconsin voters at polls today, it concerns me that that's what could happen this fall.

And you know, I'm working with my colleagues across the country and we're all trying to tackle this together because even a vote by mail system has impacted because we need workers to process ballots.

So it's gonna be a national effort, and every election official I know is thinking of nothing.

But how do we, you know, deal with Corona virus and allowed people to vote?

Do you think that every state should move to all mail voting right now?

I think that they're gonna have to build in the capacity to deal with high absentee ballot returns.

I think that states that have very low numbers some states have 3 to 5% of their ballots are returned by mail in a normal election before covert 19 struck, they're gonna have the heaviest lift.

And it's gonna probably have to be a combination of some sort of vote center model and absentee voting.

But absolutely when 16% of our population are over 60 years old, we already have a need for those voters do not have to go into a polling place to vote.

Election experts have found that While voter fraud is rare, it's most common with male in balance.

The president is also concerned about fraud, especially when there's no one to check voter I.

So how confident are you that Washington voters are who they say they are and that you're not allowing fraud?

As with any voting system, you have to build in the compensating controls to instill confidence.

So if you're going to send everybody a ballot, you need a measure on the back end like we have here in Washington, where we check every signal single signature of the voter registration record on file.

We do that to make sure people don't vote more than once because we have controls to make sure that we give them credit.

And so it's It's really important to have that balance between access and security.

And I can tell you in Washington State we do not have higher fraud because we vote by mail.

In fact, we had more problems than our 2000 for governor's race at the polls.

The last time we voted at the polls as the state at polling place voting that we did with vote by mail.

With all mail in voting, are you concerned that some people won't be reached like Native American communities or people that have a P O box address is, you know, these air communities that we have to be in constant contact with.

And here in Washington state, we do try to work with our tribal communities to address those concerns, and we have an advantage because we have done it longer.

But it's those underserved communities are ones that you have to focus on connect with and find things that are going to make sense for their community to get ballots to voters and give them a chance to put him in drop boxes.

For example, as a Corona virus continues to spread, it certainly seems safer to vote by mail.

But the virus can also linger on surfaces.

As you mentioned, So do you have plans to protect election workers who handle large volumes of ballots?

That is absolutely where we're going to spend our time focusing in the next few months.

County election officers across the state are hoping to get the federal funds that Congress has allocated through the Cares Act.

And we're gonna try to put those to use right away once our state gets us the matching funds and we hope to expand our ballot processing centers are in person customer service for voter registration and ballot issuance, and really build in those safeguards for our voters and our workers.

And what your state and four other states have done really changes the culture around.

Voting Election Day was traditionally a national civic event.

You know where people would put the the stickers on.

I voted, In your opinion, do we lose anything when we vote from home over an extended time period?

And it was what made it the hardest decision for me when I was a county election official.

Thio move away from pole site voting But you know, it's just new traditions.

Now I think family sit around the table and they have discussions they didn't have before.

And you just change what that tradition looks like over that 18 day voting window.

Secretary Weimann, Thank you so much for your time.

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