ABSTRACT
Nebraska Secretary John Gale knows that as his state’s chief elections officer, he wears ’several different hats’. But in his view, his primary job as Secretary of State is to ’ensure that the election laws of the state and federal governments are enforced’. As the state’s chief interpreter, administrator, and enforcer of election laws, the Secretary is charged with ensuring that mountainous volumes of state laws regulating elections are implemented accurately and evenly throughout the state. In Washington in 2006, Secretary Sam Reed heard reports from local elections officials who had found that a nonprofit organization had submitted over 1,700 ’blatantly fraudulent voter registrations’ with ’forged names’. And in Oregon, the Secretary of State is empowered to impose administrative penalties to enforce campaign finance violations. If any violations give ground to a civil suit, the Secretary of State refers the information to the state Attorney General’s office.
