In recent years the office added election cybersecurity to its repertoire, in response to a surge in worldwide cybersecurity incidents and complaints from Republicans including former gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp about election cheating.
“Elections are not boring anymore,” said Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs.
Cybersecurity appears to be the biggest issue in the contest between Hobbs and Republican challenger Dale Whitaker.
In May 2023, Hobbs authorized a no-bid $272,838 contract to hire the London-based firm Locally to monitor election misinformation on X, Facebook and other social media platforms. While the Secretary of State’s Office has no control over misinformation, it does draw public attention to false election claims. The contract runs from June 1, 2023 through Dec. 31, 2024.
Republican Secretary of State candidate Whitaker has zeroed in on this contract as a major plank in his campaign against Hobbs, arguing that it shows that Hobbs does not trust Washington’s voters. “There is a level of distrust with the current Secretary of State. I’m going to tear up that contract when I take office. It instills fear in a lot of folks,” Whitaker said.
Hobbs responds: “No one is suppressing anyone’s freedom of speech.”
Whitaker criticized the contract not being put out for bids. The state GOP party filed a complaint concerning this bid with the state’s Executive Ethics Board. The board quickly dismissed it.
Hobbs countered that Washington needed to quickly begin to track election-related misinformation, citing the circulating falsehoods that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 mob storming the nation’s Capitol. He said the contract would be put out for bids if the program continues beyond Dec. 31.
Whitaker and Hobbs are expected to face each other in November’s election as they are the only candidates running serious campaigns for this office. “No Labels” candidate Damon Townsend has raised $2,347 and spent $3,785, according to the Washington Public Disclosure Commission. Democrat Marquez Tiggs has raised nothing and spent nothing. Endorsed by the state Republican Party, Whitaker has raised $44,813 and spent $34,450. Meanwhile, Hobbs has raised $114,483 and spent $15,941 so far, according to the Public Disclosure Commission.
Whitaker, 34, is a British native who became an American citizen in 2015 after moving to the United States with his wife, who is American. He has a Union Jack and American eagle tattoo on his left forearm to commemorate his citizenship. After several years as a corporate accountant, he set up his own small accounting firm in Spokane in 2014.
Until recently, he was also executive director for almost three years of We Believe, We Vote, a Spokane-based conservative organization that surveys political candidates about their opinions on social and cultural issues such as Christianity, the Constitution, gay marriage, abortion and the First and Second Amendments. Whitaker resigned from We Believe, We Vote because of his candidacy for secretary of state. Whitaker said his stint with We Believe, We Vote would have no bearing on the technocratic, administrative nature of the secretary of state’s office.
Whitaker wants to allow same day in-person voting, while also keeping mail-in voting. He also wants to trim red tape for corporations registering with the secretary of state’s office. He proposes removing party affiliation declarations from primary ballots to increase voter participation. Whitaker also wants more rigorous background checks on people registering to vote.
Hobbs, 54, has been a soldier for most of his adult life, starting as an enlisted military intelligence specialist, later becoming an infantry officer. He left active duty in 2005, did a short stint as a facilities manager at the University of Washington and joined the Washington National Guard in 2006 as an infantry officer. He is now a lieutenant colonel and public information officer in the National Guard. He has no tattoos but does fly flags from his Army units on the walls of his office.
“I like being a soldier. It’s nice doing something besides politics,” Hobbs said.
He was a Democratic state senator from Lake Stevens from 2007 to 2021, rising to become chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee. When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security hired Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman in 2021 to become senior election security advisor for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Gov. Jay Inslee appointed Hobbs as her replacement. Hobbs won a special election for the post the following year.
At that time, there was massive political speculation that Inslee wanted to remove the moderate from his Transportation Committee chairmanship because Hobbs kept killing one of the governor’s major initiatives — a bill to create low-carbon fuel standards in Washington — in committee.
Hobbs acknowledges some truth in that speculation. But he says Inslee chose him primarily because of the cybersecurity expertise he picked up in the National Guard. “You want someone in there to understand the threat. I’m sorry, but Dale doesn’t have it,” Hobbs said.
Hobbs is the first Democratic secretary of state since 1965. From 1981 to 2021, the office was held by Ralph Munro, Sam Reed and Wyman — who all had excellent relations with Washington’s primarily Democratic leadership and voters.
During Hobbs’ tenure, the Secretary of State’s Office has helped deal with four threats to local government computer systems, plus other, more physical threats to election offices.
In August 2022 in southwestern Washington, the Cowlitz County’s public works department paid $184,235 to a fraudulent bank account after receiving a phishing email requesting the county to update payment information for an existing vendor, according to The Daily News of Longview. The Columbian, a newspaper in Vancouver, reported suspicious activity on the Clark County government’s computer network in October 2023.
In 2022, a ransomware attack struck the government of Ferry County in Central Washington, following a 2021 ransomware attack on Lincoln County., According to NPR, that sparked both sets of county commissioners to toss out a so-called “Albert sensor” that tracks threatening IP addresses. Hobbs has been a strong advocate of county governments being equipped with Albert sensors, and most Washington county governments have them.
Ironically, the Secretary of State’s Office was one of the few state agencies hit by July 19’s CrowdStrike worldwide software meltdown. However, that problem, which affected airlines, hospitals, businesses and government agencies, was due to a faulty software update from the security software company. The Secretary of State’s Corporations & Charities Divisions suffered some technical problems, but was back online that same Friday afternoon. Phone, chat and in-person services resumed on Monday. The outage did not delay the mailing of primary election ballots, which had been mostly mailed by local election offices before the disruption.
Hobbs is trying to improve outreach from his department, setting up a satellite office in Cheney with plans to set up another in King County.
This year, Hobbs had Sen. Sam Hunt, D-Olympia, introduce a bill that increased from 10% to 25% the percentage of a library district’s eligible voters required to set up a referendum to dissolve a library district. This was a response to an unsuccessful attempt by non-Dayton Columbia County residents to dissolve their library in Dayton because it offered LGBTQ+ young adult books. The bill passed with strong bipartisan support.
