KUOW: Some election overseers want to make their offices nonpartisan to inspire greater trust

In 2022, ERN published the results of a survey finding wide, cross-partisan support for nonpartisan election administration. This article, originally published by the Northwest News Network, cites our survey in a story about the hotly contested 2022 Washington Secretary of State race, in which one of the primary candidates ran as in independent.

“A poll released Tuesday by a small nonprofit — the Election Reformers Network — found that a wide majority of Americans want election administrators to be free from close party ties.

In the online survey of 1,498 likely voters, over two-thirds of respondents (including 66% of Democrats, 69% of Republicans and 70% of independents) said it’s difficult to trust the impartiality of election officials who are elected with the support of a political party. When asked if they believed their own state election officials would settle an election dispute fairly, barely half (55%) said yes, according to the poll commissioned by the Bethesda, Maryland-based good government group.“

(More on the results of the survey here.)

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