Five questions with Paddy McGuire, Steve Duenkel

Paddy McGuire

1. Why are you running for the county auditor’s office?

Serving as County Auditor for the last four years has been a pleasure and an honor, but I still have things that I want to accomplish. I am very proud of what we have done in my first term including producing the first-ever county voters’ pamphlet giving you information about the people and measures on the local ballot and getting the state to pay its fair share of election costs, saving Mason County taxpayers money. I installed 24/7 security in our ballot processing room and in every ballot drop box. Plus, I added the first drop box in the west end of the county at the Dayton Fire Station. I reduced the number of managers in my office while providing first-class service to our customers in licensing and recording. In Financial Services, we have worked closely with the State Auditor to identify and stop waste and fraud while preparing the county’s preliminary budget and ensuring the county’s employees and bills are paid on time. I couldn’t have done this without a great staff that works hard to serve the people who pay our salaries. I hope that you allow me to continue to serve.

2. What are your qualifications to be county auditor?

I am an election professional with more than twenty years of experience managing elections at the federal, state, and now local level. Before being elected Auditor, I served as Deputy Director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, the Pentagon agency that ensures that military service members, their families, and citizens living overseas get to vote, wherever they are in the world. Prior to that, I oversaw the implementation of vote-by-mail as Deputy Secretary of State in Oregon. In that position, I also oversaw 75 auditors, so have strong financial management experience. More importantly than what I have done, I have built and supported a great, professional staff. At a time when other organizations have trouble hiring, I just had 32 applicants for an entry-level position, because my office has a reputation as a great place to work. I am very proud of my team.

3. What is or will be the primary challenge of the county auditor’s office as the next term begins?

First, I want to make certain that the Auditor’s Office remains a great place to work so we can keep and hire the best employees to serve our customers.

Second, fighting mis- and disinformation regarding our elections. Raising doubt and suspicion is easy, but building confidence in our safe, secure, and accurate election systems is hard. We used to be concerned only about foreign threats to our elections, but now have to be concerned about rogue election officials too. Finally, my office needs a new space for ballot processing. We are shoehorned into a small space that limits the ability for outside observers to monitor our processes and means we cannot purchase new equipment to speed our ballot processing because there is nowhere to put it. I am working closely with the County Commission and hope to have a new, larger space next year.

4. In addition to overseeing the elections process, the county auditor’s office has a number of other crucial functions in county government. Tell us how you would plan, organize and prioritize work in these areas.

The Financial Services department pays the bills and employees for the county and 22 junior districts, fire, port, and school districts, saving them money. We also prepare the county’s preliminary budget, so taxpayers can see what agency budget requests are and have the ability to provide comments to the County Commission. We also work closely with the State Auditor in their review of the county and those junior districts, helping to ensure your tax dollars are spent appropriately. In Licensing and Recording, the staff is cross-trained, so able to assist the next customer always. We’ve added front-line staff and reduced the managers from two to one. My goal is to provide great customer service and never forget that our customers are paying our salaries.

5. Elections in the United States are considered among the most safe, secure and fair in the world by top election officials of both major political parties. Do you agree, and why or why not?

I absolutely agree. I also believe that the vote-by-mail processes that we use in Washington are the most voter-friendly and secure processes there are anywhere. We have worked closely with the Secretary of State to harden our cyber systems to lower the likelihood that they will be compromised and our ballot counting system is not connected to the internet at all. I oversaw the installation of a 24/7 security system in the ballot processing room so know if there is ever any unauthorized access instantaneously.

I have had the opportunity to monitor elections overseas on behalf of the US State Department during the Trump and Biden administrations. Our elections are the envy of the world, but there are new internal and external threats of mis- and disinformation that undercut confidence. There are many unseen elements of election security including 24/7 electronic monitoring of our ballot drop boxes and internal fire suppression that protect your vote. When I ran four years ago, I promised to implement risk-limiting audits of our elections so we now have two post-election audits after every election to confirm the results. Every audit and every recount under my watch has been 100 percent accurate, not off by a single vote. Mason County voters can rest assured that only qualified people can vote, and their ballots will be treated with care and counted exactly as they intend. I have a great, dedicated election staff committed to fairness and accuracy.

Question from Steve Duenkel

DUENKEL: When Mason County received Chan-Zuckerburg Foundation money through a grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life in 2020, you produced a voter pamphlet and advertising through our local newspaper.  The pamphlet and newspaper ads prominently acknowledged the CTCL grant, however, County budgetary information received through public records requests shows that CTCL grant money was not used at all for publication of the pamphlet or advertisements, but instead diverted to pay for remodeling of the licensing and recording departments along with a small amount of advertising on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.  This is not consistent with how you proposed to spend this money in the grant application.  What County money was used to pay for the pamphlet and advertising, why was that source not featured on the pamphlet and newspaper advertising instead of the CTCL grant, and how did your featuring of the CTCL grant on the pamphlet and newspaper advertising relate to the CTCL’s publication of a glowing feature article about you in February 2021?  

McGUIRE: I love this question because it allows me to show how I have been creative while saving local taxpayers money. In early 2020, I applied for and received two grants, one from the CTCL for $33,000 and one from the Secretary of State for $169,000, and both required all money be expended in 2020. I wanted to focus on voter outreach and education with the first and so produced an eight-page mailer that was mailed to every household in the county with information like the location of our ballot drop boxes and the various deadlines around the election, encouraging people to return their ballots early. With the second grant, I focused more on infrastructure, including remodeling the ballot processing room to add an outside entrance, and purchasing the security system there so that observers could watch processing from anywhere. Shortly after the election, I received word from CTCL that they would extend the deadline to spend their grant money by six months, so I called them and asked them if could use that money to remodel my upstairs space where the election staff had been and they said yes, so we shifted the expenses initially applied to the CTCL grant to the other grant and used the CTCL grant for the remodel. No county money was used for the outreach effort and the glowing article was because CTCL values professional election administrators. All of this was with the approval of the County Commission through the budget amendment process.

Steve Duenkel

1. Why are you running for the county auditor’s office?

I am running for the County Auditor’s office to return many of the aspects of the office to the people, beginning with getting more taxpayer input for the development of the preliminary county budget and with providing taxpayers more transparency on how their money is spent.

I want to return elections to the people. It concerns me to:

Hear our (former) Secretary of State admit that illegal aliens can vote in Washington State.

Learn first hand that our voter rolls are not current and correct.

Learn from the manuals provided by our voting system supplier, Clear Ballot, that machines can make changes to digital ballot images on their own.

Know that there is no check to confirm that scanned ballot images match the paper ballots.

Know that Mason County is running elections with machines that have not met the federal certification requirements as required by law.

Know that our voting machines are vulnerable to unauthorized access.

Know that unique election data (Web Activity Logs) were deleted prior to the 22 month retention window required by law. These logs are essential for any real audit of an election.

Know that only one Mason County ballot drop boxes is under video surveillance.

Know that ballot harvesting is not illegal in our State.

Know that use of ballot drop boxes transfers liability to the County from the U.S. Postal Service in the event of a lawsuit pertaining to election fraud enabled by drop box misuse.

These things should concern all Mason County voters.

2. What are your qualifications to be county auditor?

I would refer voters to the Voters Pamphlet for a detailing of my qualifications. I have ample experience building budgets, reporting on performance to budgets, managing a financial management systems group responsible for accounts payable and accounts receivable, and financial reporting. This is backed by formal education (MBA) where I concentrated studies in finance and business law. I will add that my last senior leadership assignment with Boeing was with the military side of the Company working on government contracts where procedural compliance is of utmost importance. I know how to audit. I know how to lead great teams. This is all reflected in a successful career where I oftentimes had to quickly master something completely new and different. I have a demonstrated record or performance on the job. On top of this, I have recent experience in the election integrity domain as a member of the Washington State Republican Party Election Integrity Committee, Chair of the Mason County Election Integrity Committee, and Chair of the non-partisan Mason County Voter Research Project.

I think it is more important for an Auditor to be an effective leader of the great people working in the Auditor’s office, rather than having experience in very limited area and ‘policy wonk’ credentials that sound official.

3. What is or will be the primary challenge of the county auditor’s office as the next term begins?

The biggest challenge of the county auditor’s office will be to strengthen voter confidence in our election system. I will develop a comprehensive program to educate voters on all aspects of our election system. I want citizens to understand what works well (such as the great work done by the terrific employees of the Elections office) and where there are vulnerabilities and other opportunities to improve. Then, with citizen input from all political affiliations we can begin the work to improve things within the Auditor’s span of control. Other improvements will require work with the Secretary of State, other county elections officials, and the Legislature. This is where the people of Mason County can count on me to be their eyes, ears, and voice as we work to return our elections to the people of Mason County.

4. In addition to overseeing the elections process, the county auditor’s office has a number of other crucial functions in county government. Tell us how you would plan, organize and prioritize work in these areas.

Unlike my opponent, I would dedicate roughly equal time and attention in all four major areas of the Auditor’s office (Financial Services Department, Elections, Licensing, Recording).

In my years of private sector experience, I have a proven record of making process improvements driven by customer requirements (who in this case is the people of Mason County), using a systems engineering approach and the application of process improvement methodology often known as “Continuous Quality Improvement”, or “Lean”. As I did in my private sector career, I will work with the employees in each of these areas to identify the opportunities for improvement, prioritize them with citizen input, and pull together the right resources to seize them. This is leadership. The objective is to find ways to “do more with less” and make the most out of every taxpayer’s dollar, which is especially important in this time of runaway inflation and economic stagnation.

5. Elections in the United States are considered among the most safe, secure and fair in the world by top election officials of both major political parties. Do you agree, and why or why not?

It’s interesting that elections officials and the media emphasize “safe, secure, and fair” elections. What do those words really mean? Growing numbers of people have lost confidence in our election system. This is a form of voter suppression.

It is vital in our constitutional republic to have elections were every legal vote is treated as sacred and every illegal vote is kept out of the system, and the system is readily accessible to all legal voters. This is how the sovereign power of citizens is expressed with fidelity. In Mason County, this translates to ensuring voters rolls are current and correct (which they are not), effectively addressing the profound vulnerabilities of voting system machines, and protecting against the breaks in ballot chain of custody created by vote by mail and ballot drop boxes.

Elections are not made more secure by turning them over to machines for the maintenance of voter rolls, ballot tabulation, and voter signature verification, while enacting laws that prevent citizens from having access to election data. The elections belong to the people!

Note: some European countries have abandoned vote by mail and the use of voting machines and returned to conducting elections with one day of voting in person at a polling station (promoted by national holiday), voter photo identification requirements, and hand-counting of paper ballots. Election results are reported on election night. It used to be that way here.

Question from Paddy McGuire

McGUIRE: In your letter to the editor printed on July 21st, you said you became a Mason Count resident, but in August 2017, you voted in Snohomish County. Did you lie about when you moved here or vote illegally in Snohomish County?

DUENKEL: I purchased a condominium in Allyn on October 15, 2016, as part of my plan to retire in Mason County, and I chose Mason County residency while still owning property in Snohomish County. It was a busy time in life and I took my time to transition everything to Mason County. As Auditor, you should know the law. RCW 29A.08.140 (ii)(b) states, “A registered voter who fails to update his or her residential address by this deadline may vote according to his or her previous registration address.” The deadline for updating an address in 2017 was 29 days prior to the election based on law passed in 2011. I voted legally. As an aside, this law was revised in 2018 (taking effect in 2019) reducing the 29 day deadline to 8 days.