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“The Impact” – Election Controversy, Broadband Bills, Marysville Murder Hornet Mystery

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This week on “The Impact” we talk one-on-one with Washington’s Secretary of State Kim Wyman, the only republican in statewide office on the West Coast.

We cover election skepticism, voter confidence, and related controversies from the last election cycle that at times put Wyman at odds with some members of her own party.

“Those are pretty standard things in modern politics that republicans talk about voter fraud and democrats talk about voter suppression and they are doing it to raise money; they are doing it to get their base excited and fired up to vote; and they are also doing it now in the modern era to explain why they lost the election,” said Wyman. “I am very worried that we are undermining people’s faith in our election’s system.”

We also discuss election security in the aftermath of the SolarWinds hack.

“People need to realize that since 2014, 2014- foreign actors in Russian and China and in Iran have been waging cyber warfare on the United States. It is called asymmetric warfare and they are targeting any kind of infrastructure in the United States that they can, to get in and hack into those systems, take control of those systems, and do things like undermining our confidence in our democratic processes like elections. This is the new kind of frontier of warfare because those countries have figured out it is a lot cheaper to spend a few million dollars on a bunch of computers and a bot farm than it is to buy a tank,” said Wyman.

And we explore why a simple clerical task became a weighty decision with two broadband bills that were signed at the same time.

“My job is to capture the actions of the legislature and the governor, my job is not to make laws,” said Wyman. “We wanted to make sure that we weren’t overstepping that boundary.”

Later we’ll tell you what WSDA knows so far about the mysterious dead Asian Giant Hornet found on a Marysville lawn. For starters, they know it isn’t related to the ones we already knew about.