Meet the Faces of Democracy: Julie Wise

Julie Wise, who is not registered with any political party, has more than 24 years of election administration experience. Since 2000, she has worked for the board of elections in King County, Washington, an area that includes Seattle and is home to about 1.4 million registered voters. In 2015, she was elected the director of elections in a nonpartisan race, earning 72% of the vote. She was reelected in 2019 and 2023, when she garnered 84% of the vote.

King County is the most populous county in Washington and ranks as the thirteenth largest county in the country. In 2011, Washington became the second state in the nation, after Oregon, to conduct elections nearly exclusively by mail ballot, meaning Wise supervises election administration processes in one of the largest vote-by-mail jurisdictions in the country.

A passionate advocate for increasing voter accessibility, Wise has pioneered numerous initiatives and reforms to remove barriers to voting. Wise has added four non-English languages to King County’s full-service language suite, increased the number of ballot drop boxes from 10 to more than 75, and successfully advocated to the state legislature for prepaid return postage for Washington’s vote-by-mail system. She has also testified to the state legislature about the importance of the re-enfranchisement of Washington residents convicted of a felony.

Additionally, Wise has worked to expand voter outreach and education through the Voter Education Fund, a first-of-its-kind, public-philanthropic partnership that provides funds and training to community organizations in King County doing nonpartisan voter registration and education work in historically marginalized communities.

Over the years, she has earned numerous awards and accolades for her work, including the Washington chapter of the Korean American Coalition’s Rocky Kim Pioneer Award, the Election Center Democracy Award, the 2019 Fix Democracy First Elected Official of the Year, and the Voter Outreach Award from the Washington secretary of state in both 2017 and 2021.

Wise — an avid hiker and self-described “farm girl at heart” — has been part of Issue One’s Faces of Democracy campaign since 2023, advocating for protections for election workers and for regular, predictable, and sufficient federal funding of elections.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Issue One: How did you end up in this profession?

Julie Wise: Like a lot of election administrators, I ended up in this profession by happenstance. In early 2000, I was going to university, and I needed a job. I saw the county was hiring for that upcoming presidential election. They needed help answering phones in their phone bank. I was immediately hooked.

I loved the opportunity to be of service to my community, and I also saw an opportunity to streamline a process. I am a big geek when it comes to improving processes that could be more accessible for voters and easier for election administrators.

I also fell in love with the people. This industry really attracts some of the funniest, smartest, giving people, and that really drew me to this work. I started in 2000, and 24 years later, I have not left.

Issue One: Which part of the election administration story, in Washington specifically, do you think is not told enough or widely understood enough?

Julie Wise: The people who run our elections are professionals. Election administrators are trained and often certified on the state and national level. It’s really important for folks to realize that election administrators are not volunteers. These are individuals that are passionate about their careers and about counting every single vote. They are nonpartisan civil servants who are drawn to this work because they want to make sure that the voices of their community are being heard.

Also, election administrators are members of the community. They are the folks that are in line at the grocery store with you. They are in PTA meetings with you. They are your mothers, your grandfathers, your brothers, your sisters. Sometimes that gets lost, that we are human beings, and that what drives us to this work is a passion for democracy. We’re trained, professional, certified election administrators that really believe in democracy.

We believe democracy is at its finest when all voices are heard. Our goal is always to increase access, meaning that we’re removing barriers because we want you to be able to use your voice. We don’t care how you vote. We just want to make sure that you do vote and that you show up. Accurate, secure, and transparent elections are at the core of what we do. I think sometimes that gets lost in the narrative, especially as of late.

Issue One: How are you working to bring more transparency to the world of election administration?

Julie Wise: At King County Elections, we believe in radical transparency, and how we live that is by providing ultimate access.

When a voter puts their ballot into a mailbox or into one of our secure official ballot drop boxes, there’s sort of this void of not knowing what happens next to the ballot. There are so many detailed steps and processes that happen to the ballot after that critical moment of a voter submitting it that we want to make sure that people have transparency around.

If you’re going to buy into the election system, you need to see and understand what that looks like. We’re removing the curtain, if you will, as to what’s happening during ballot processing. We do this in many different ways.

We were one of the first counties in the country to provide web cameras to live stream our staff hard at work at each of those key processes and steps of when the ballot gets back to the elections facility. We’ve also provided radical transparency to our media. We welcome our media into our facility. We provide real access to all of the operations.

Another key component is our observer program, a nationally award-winning program that we’re very proud of. We have a program where we provide ample opportunity for both of our major political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, as well as a nonpartisan observer program that’s run through the League of Women Voters to ensure that we’ve got observers here in our elections office watching the process.

Another thing that I just absolutely love is that when we designed our facilities, our headquarters for King County Elections, we thought about transparency. We have a literally transparent, Plexiglass loop where folks can come in and watch us processing ballots.

We have nothing to hide, and we want people to be able to see their elections at work. You can give yourself a self-guided tour. We’ve got touch screen units across that fifth of a mile loop so voters can understand what’s happening at each step of the process.

We also love to provide tours ourselves. These transparency measures really help make things click for people about the election process.

Issue One: How many voters are on the roll in your jurisdiction and what are the main challenges of a jurisdiction of that size?

Julie Wise: King County makes up about a third of the voters in Washington, at about 1.4 million registered voters, and we have some of the most diverse ZIP codes in the entire country. We have over 180 languages spoken here in King County.

One of the opportunities and challenges that we have in King County is making sure that our voters have access to the key critical election data, material, and information. We provide translated materials in seven different languages. Pamphlets, ballots, and any correspondence will be in their preferred language. We also provide a host of other brochures and forms and online voter registration access in dozens of languages. Making sure that folks can understand the election process is really critical, especially if English is not your first language.

It’s one thing to provide translation and interpretation services. It is another thing to make sure your community knows that those options exist. One of the ways in which we have really worked with getting key information into limited-English-speaking communities is a program that is very near and dear to my heart. In 2016, after I first got elected, one of the languages we were translating ballot materials into was Vietnamese. I went and spoke to a group of about 200 Vietnamese community members, and I asked by show of hands how many knew that we provided ballot materials in their language. One person raised their hand.

King County goes above and beyond. We don’t wait for the Department of Justice to tell us what languages we should provide election materials into.We go ahead, and we look at the data from school districts, courts, and jails, and we go ahead and add those languages.

One of the things we started was a “Voter Education Fund,” where we have trusted messengers in the community. How you engage with the Somali community is different than how you engage with the Chinese community — which is different from engaging with the youth, low income, or incarcerated communities. You have to have unique plans to reach and engage each of those communities in a meaningful way.

That is a hard lift for election offices to do when their core job responsibility is to run accurate, secure elections. But we must take a step back and empower the amazing community-based organizations we have that have been doing work in their respective communities for decades. King County provides $1 million every two years to community-based organizations to get out the vote, to engage with those communities, to reach out to folks to let them know we have materials in different languages, to demystify the election process, and to encourage them not only to vote, but to run for office — because we know that’s another key component about engaging in elections.

Issue One: Many people are surprised to learn the federal government doesn’t routinely fund the costs of running elections. What is the price tag of running an election in your jurisdiction and where does funding for election administration come from?

Julie Wise: Consistent, reliable funding is critical to running accurate, secure, and transparent elections. We’re fortunate in King County, for the most part. We’ve got a budget of about $20 million annually, and we get about 50% of that as revenue from the jurisdictions that we run elections for. We have some major players, though, that do not pay for their elections, like the federal government. That impacts all of us, but especially those rural small counties that do not have consistent reliable funding.

The federal government is the only jurisdiction in Washington state that is not footing the bill for their elections that we are running. There are a lot of grant opportunities, which are fabulous and those are welcomed by election administrators, but grant opportunities are very hard to budget and plan for. When you do not know how much money you’re going to get, you’re hoping and praying that you’re going to be able to get funding to keep staff safe. That’s not okay.

Elections are the foundation of our democracy. If we want to make sure that we’ve got good, consistent, reliable systems — from technology to safety to staffing — we need to be able to have reliable funding.

It’s not fair that you have a fire district with a thousand voters that’s paying their fair share of the elections, but you’ve got federal races on the ballot and the federal government is not paying for those.

Issue One: What should the federal government do to make sure that they’re routinely paying their fair share for election administration costs? 

Julie Wise: Funding needs to be a regular budget line item.Funding for critical elections infrastructure should not be an afterthought, or just grant programs, or just sporadic funding during presidential elections. We run federal elections every two years. Any election administrator will tell you that as soon as we finish this presidential election, we are right onto planning the next election. It takes that much time and effort.

My No. 1 priority this presidential election is keeping my staff and my voters safe. These are people that are devoted and dedicated to the cause of democracy. We need to protect them. Reliable, consistent funding would really help with that. If we fundamentally believe that everyone has a right to the ballot box, then we really need to put our money behind that.

Issue One: As the presidential election approaches, there has been a lot of concern across the country from election administrators about the use of deepfakes and generative artificial intelligence (AI) spreading false information about the election process. What concerns do you have about these threats, and how has Washington been able to provide resources to curb your concerns about them?

Julie Wise: As technology evolves, we’ve got to be preparing and planning. When we talk about AI, and we talk about going into a presidential election, one of the things that we did at King County Elections was tabletop exercises about crisis scenarios. We have also been monitoring information.

There are pros to AI, but I think that we have to be very cognizant and very aware of AI and deepfake activities that could manipulate the election. It is critically important for us to be able to get ahead of it.

I’m also really proud of the work that we’ve done in our state legislature ahead of this. Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs made a legislation request of Senate Bill 5152 this last legislative session. This bill prohibits political campaigns from using realistic but false images, videos, or audio to deliberately spread election disinformation.

Issue One: We have seen a rise in threats, harassment, and intimidation of election officials and election workers this year as a result of the spread of false election information. Earlier this year, House Bill 1241 was signed into law in Washington state, which made it a class C felony to threaten an election worker in writing or in person. How will this legislation help protect election workers? And what more do you believe is needed to protect election workers and election officials?

Julie Wise: That legislation was requested by myself and the other local election officials in Washington. We told the legislature that we really need to be protecting our election administrators — not just the elected folks that run the elections, but all of our election administration staff. We had a great law in place that made it a felony if you harassed someone in person, but we needed to tie up the loose ends to include virtual harassment of people in writing.

Here in King County, last year, we received two envelopes threatening us, and unfortunately both of those envelopes contained fentanyl. It is incredibly important for us to continue to have the help of local, federal, and state law enforcement to really make sure that we’re helping our local election offices be prepared for scenarios like this or other scenarios that can happen.

Again, it goes back to funding. We need reliable, federal funding to be able to make sure that our elections facilities can handle things like fentanyl-laced envelopes, active shooter trainings, and security measures like bulletproof glass in front of our elections facilities. Those are all costly things, but they are critically important to safeguarding our elections, our staff, and our voters. We need to see more reliable funding, and we need to see consistent laws across this country about protecting our election administrators and protecting our voters when they’re accessing the ballot box.

Issue One: How are you coordinating with law enforcement to increase the safety of your communities and of elections? And how do you approach communicating about the presence of law enforcement at polling places to your community?

Julie Wise: It’s such a delicate balance. We want to make sure that voters are safe and that our staff are safe, but we also want to make sure that that doesn’t deter people from voting. When we do hire law enforcement, we work with law enforcement to talk candidly about how body language, or the literal physical positioning of where their cars are, can be perceived as more intimidating for our voters. It’s being very cognizant of that and being very mindful. We also provide all of our law enforcement with election law books. They are not always dealing with election laws, so we educate them.

Also, I meet every month with what we call the Elections Incident Response Team, which is made up of federal, county, and local law enforcement. I’m a subject matter expert in elections. They’re a subject matter expert in protecting our community. We get everyone in the room together once a month and talk about what we’re hearing at the federal and local level. We’re all working together so that we’re fully connected.

Issue One: Given all of these challenges, what has inspired you to stay in this line of work for more than 20 years?

Julie Wise: The people. I find joy in working with both voters and the staff.

What also fills my cup is when I talk to community members and a person has just been naturalized, getting the right to vote and getting to see how excited they are to be able to get their ballot and vote [for the first time]. Those sort of things remind me of why we’re doing this work and what we’re here for.

Also, I’m a person who loves change and continuous improvement. There are always ways for us to do elections better — better access for our voters, more streamlined, quicker election results. All of those things really make me geek out and really interest me.

I joke sometimes that I’m not leaving until I get 100%voter registration of eligible voters in King County and 100% turnout. Those are always going to be my goals. When you remove barriers to voter access, people will show up and make their voices heard. That brings me to tears. It gives me goosebumps to think that we were part of that.

Issue One: Outside of being passionate about running safe and secure elections, what are some of your hobbies and what is a fun fact that most people might not know about you?

Julie Wise: I am an avid hiker. I absolutely love to be outdoors. I also love my puppy that I got a couple of months ago. I live very close to the Puget Sound, and I love to start my day with a cup of coffee and grounding myself and meditating on the beach and watching my goofy dog chase seagulls.

Something else that people might not know about me is that I’m a farm girl at heart. I know how to show a hog. I know how to shear a sheep. I know how to milk a goat.

Issue One: What is your favorite book or movie?

Julie Wise: I usually have a nonfiction book in one hand and a self-help book in the other. I think “The Four Agreements” is one of the best books of all time. As for movies, my favorite is probably “The Usual Suspects.”

Note: This piece was cross-published with The Fulcrum.