Judd Choate (M LA’94, PhD LA’97) talks about the logistics of voting during a
pandemic, how to spot bad information on the web, and what it was like to lead the US response to Russian interference in the 2016 election

Fifteen minutes before our Wednesday morning interview was due to start, I got a text. 

“Hi, Judd here. I’m on a call with my secretary of state. Can we talk at 9:15? I should be fine by then.”  

The night before, June 9, Georgia became the latest state to undergo chaos at the ballot box. As the media speculated about what went wrong, Choate was busy debriefing with Colorado state officials. 

“What happened last night in Georgia is basically what you’d expect,” Choate explains. “They went from a polling place model to a hybrid vote-by-mail election. I’m impressed it went as well as it did. COVID has really changed the landscape of the way you conduct an election in the United States.” 

And only a handful of states were set up to handle this sort of situation, says Choate — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Each of those states automatically sends ballots to voters. There is no magic “vote-by-mail” switch. It takes time, money, voter outreach, and well-trained election officials and volunteers. 

“If I lived in a totalitarian regime right now and they gave me six months to put together a vote-by-mail election, I could do that. The thing is, it wouldn’t be a good election. It would be sloppy. A lot of things would go wrong because I don’t have the infrastructure or laws in place or the people trained or institutional memory to allow my voters and the election officials to successfully conduct that election.” 

Colorado: A Voting Success Story

According to US News, Colorado ranked third in the country for voter turnout in 2016. But looking to the not-so-distant past, Colorado was firmly middle of the pack. In 2000, the state ranked 26th. 

“If you want an A on the paper, you have to put in the effort to earn that grade,” says Choate. So that’s exactly what Colorado started doing. “Now, Colorado’s turnout is in the top five every cycle.” 

Indiana, on the other hand, consistently suffers from low voter turnout. So what’s the difference? How did Colorado get to where it is, and how can a state like Indiana replicate its success? 

“Registration is the gateway drug,” says Choate. “If you want to increase voter turnout, you must concentrate on registration — and there are a number of things you can do on the policy side to increase registration.

“The world has changed from the 1950s and 1960s when we were a much more industrial economy. Today, we’re a service economy. Your voters expect you to provide services. They expect you to engage them. If you don’t, you’ll get what you get — lower voter turnout, lack of confidence in the election, and general election malaise.” 

Colorado, he says, is one of about a dozen states that actively engages its electorate. 

“In September of this year, we’ll send a postcard to 800,000 Coloradans, and we’ll tell them, ‘Hey, you should register to vote! Here’s how you do it.’ If you want an actively engaged electorate, then give every opportunity to register.”

Foreign Interference in American Elections

In 2016, Choate was the incoming president of the National Association of State Election Directors. 

“I was the lucky one who got to be the lead director on all the post-2016 Russian investigation and critical infrastructure changes,” says Choate. “I mean that flippantly, but at the same time, I was really lucky. What that meant was that Colorado was at the forefront of all the changes that happened as a consequence of Russian hacking and disinformation attempts in 2016. 

“We spent all of 2017 and much of 2018 mapping out a good strategy, identifying who could help us accomplish the goals we were laying out, and building the infrastructure needed.” 

While Choate is concerned about foreign interference in the 2020 election, his concerns aren’t necessarily that Russia or another foreign actor will directly hack into voting systems or voter registration databases. 

“Those are important things we work on, but frankly, we’ve built up our security infrastructure so significantly over the past decade that this is far less of a concern than it might have been in 2016,” he says. “The thing that keeps me up at night is the ability of one person or a well-organized team to create misinformation and discord among my voters. Such an attempt might be aimed at casting doubt on the validity of an election or might try to convince people that the voting equipment is unreliable. More than that, they could try to convince people that Election Day has been moved or that a candidate believes or said something untrue. 

“Voters need to listen to and believe in my office, not random people making provocative statements on social media.”