EXAMPLE PAGE - SCHOOL BROCHURE - DEMOCRACY - Flipbook - Page 40
INSIDE AN ELECTION
BEHIND
THE
SCENES
with Colorado’s State
Election Director
Judd Choate (M LA’94, PhD LA’97) talks
about the logistics of voting during a
pandemic, how to spot bad information
on the web, and what it was like to lead
the US response to Russian interference
in the 2016 election
Fifteen minutes before our Wednesday morning interview was due to start, I got a text.
“Hi, Judd here. I’m on a call with my secretary of state.
Can we talk at 9:15? I should be fine by then.”
The night before, June 9, Georgia became the latest state
to undergo chaos at the ballot box. As the media speculated
about what went wrong, Choate was busy debriefing with
Colorado state officials.
“What happened last night in Georgia is basically
what you’d expect,” Choate explains. “They went from
a polling place model to a hybrid vote-by-mail election.
I’m impressed it went as well as it did. COVID has really
changed the landscape of the way you conduct an election
in the United States.”
And only a handful of states were set up to handle this
sort of situation, says Choate — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon,
Utah, and Washington. Each of those states automatically
sends ballots to voters. There is no magic “vote-by-mail”
switch. It takes time, money, voter outreach, and welltrained election officials and volunteers.
38 PUR D U E A LUMNUS
“If I lived in a totalitarian regime right now and they gave
me six months to put together a vote-by-mail election, I
could do that. The thing is, it wouldn’t be a good election. It
would be sloppy. A lot of things would go wrong because I
don’t have the infrastructure or laws in place or the people
trained or institutional memory to allow my voters and the
election officials to successfully conduct that election.”
Colorado: A Voting Success Story
According to US News, Colorado ranked third in the
country for voter turnout in 2016. But looking to the notso-distant past, Colorado was firmly middle of the pack. In
2000, the state ranked 26th.
“If you want an A on the paper, you have to put in the
effort to earn that grade,” says Choate. So that’s exactly
what Colorado started doing. “Now, Colorado’s turnout is in
the top five every cycle.”
Indiana, on the other hand, consistently suffers from
low voter turnout. So what’s the difference? How did Colorado get to where it is, and how can a state like Indiana
replicate its success?
“Registration is the gateway drug,” says Choate. “If you
want to increase voter turnout, you must concentrate on
