High Turnout Wide Margins High Turnout Wide Margins

In February, High Turnout Wide Margins was invited to do a live recording at the first in-person meeting of the US Alliance for Election Excellence – a nonpartisan collaborative of election administrators and subject matter experts.

Hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey spoke with two election administrators that night – Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan Secretary of State, and Pam Anderson, who ran for Colorado Secretary of State and has a long history of working in Colorado elections.

In December, host Brianna Lennon went on her first international election observation mission. She traveled to Tunisia in northern Africa to observe their December 17, 2022, Parliamentary election, which comes after a consolidation of power under their current president and a relatively new constitution that he helped craft.

She and co-host Eric Fey spoke with Don Bisson, the head of the Tunisia Election Observation Mission for the Carter Center before the observation took place to learn more about his experiences, as well as more about international observation, in general.

And then Brianna spoke with Justin Roebuck, the County Clerk of Ottawa County, Michigan, after the observation was completed about some of what they both learned throughout the process.

You can read the Carter Center’s Preliminary Report from the Tunisian elections on December 17, 2022, “Historically Low Turnout in Tunisia’s Parliamentary Election Confirms Need for Renewed Dialogue” at https://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/2022/tunisia-121922.html.

You can read about the Carter Center’s Preliminary report from the Tunisian runoff elections on January 29, 2023, “Post-election Statement: Low Turnout in Tunisia Election Reaffirms Need for Broad-Based Consensus” at https://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/2023/tunisia-020123.html/.

Back in November, High Turnout Wide Margins hosted a film screening at Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, Missouri. The documentary called ‘No Time to Fail’ follows the work of numerous Rhode Island election administrators during the 2020 Presidential Election as they navigate their day-to-day work, the growing threat of disinformation and mistrust in elections and the global pandemic.

After the screening, hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey spoke with one of the film’s protagonists, Rob Rock, the Director of Elections for the state of Rhode Island, about his experiences in elections.

You can learn more about the documentary at https://www.notimetofailfilm.com/

In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Kathy Boockvar. She’s the former Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from 2019- 2021 and a member of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, which works to protect election officials from physical threats, violence, and intimidation through coordination with law enforcement.

They spoke about some of her own experiences working with law enforcement for protection during her time as Pennsylvania Secretary of state, as well as about how local election officials can start working now to ensure the physical safety of their staff and their office during the 2024 election cycle.

In June, hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey, along with Managing Editor Rebecca Smith, traveled to Central and Eastern Europe to learn more about election administration in democracies overseas.

In this episode, our hosts are back in Moldova – a small country nestled between Romania and Ukraine that was a part of the former Soviet Union. They spoke with Mariana Novac and Nicolae Panfil with Promo-LEX, an association that organizes domestic observations of elections at all levels, shares with governmental organizations and citizens about how elections have gone, and shares ways they believe processes could be improved – to restore and build trust in the Moldovan democratic process.

In June, hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey, along with Managing Editor Rebecca Smith, traveled to Central and Eastern Europe to learn more about election administration in democracies overseas.

In this episode, our hosts are back in Moldova – a small country nestled between Romania and Ukraine that was a part of the former Soviet Union – speaking with Dr. Doina Bordeianu and Pavel Cabacenco with the Center for Continuous Electoral Training, or CICDE. This is a partner organization of the country’s Central Election Commission that focuses on the continued education of election workers and the education of the next generation of voters in the country.