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Wyman's Wire for May 2018
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Greetings from Olympia! It’s May, which is bringing (occasionally) warmer weather, more daylight hours, and the ongoing full bloom of flowers from the Capitol Campus cherry grove to many other corners of our expansive state.

Kim Wyman speaking to reporters.As I write, we’re working hard on a project to make voting even easier for all Washingtonians.

Inspired by the King County Council’s proposal to fund the postage for vote-by-mail ballots for their constituency in the 2018 Primary and General Elections, I’ve asked the governor to approve emergency funding to give the same support to every voter in all 39 counties.

This is a cause I’ve taken to the Legislature in years past, and I’m again on board with a bipartisan bill for 2019 to make postage-paid ballots permanent. This is a great opportunity to improve voter turnout in our state.

This is also the time of year when our Legislative Building office bustles with visiting school classes and other groups of young people eager to learn about government. We’re anticipating hundreds of young Washingtonians this week for the 71st session of the Youth Legislature put on by the YMCA Youth and Government program. It’s so energizing to see the next generation taking such interest in the value of civic engagement!

If you'd like to stay current on what's happening at the Office of Secretary of State, I highly encourage you to read our blog, From Our Corner. That's where we post lots of great content from the main office, the Washington State Library, Washington State Archives, Elections, and more. Check it out at blogs.sos.wa.gov/fromourcorner.

Thanks for your time and interest in our office. Please forward this message to anyone you think might be interested in reading it and encourage them to subscribe. You can also follow our office on InstagramTwitter and Facebook.

As always, thank you for the privilege of serving as your Secretary of State. 

Sincerely,

FREE STATE ARCHIVES WORKSHOP: MAPS, LAND AND TRANSPORTATION

Front entrance of the Archives.
May is an exciting time at the State Archives. This month's theme: maps, land, and transportation. It's also Preservation Month, so we’re hosting a series of workshops on Saturday, May 5th, in the Olympia Archives Building.

Archivists will show off maps, land records, and transportation records that historians and genealogists use in their research. A hot topic in family research right now is georeferencing — using online tools to find exact historical locations, such as an ancestor’s land. The State Archives’ records can be remarkably useful in turning up this material!

We’ll also have presentations on Puget Sound’s first American steamboats by renowned Washington historians Michael “Tug” Buse and Celia Fulton Waldren, and a display of amazing historical maps with presentations on how we preserve them.

Space is limited, so register here to join this free event at the State Archives, 1129 Washington Street Southeast, Olympia, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. May 5th.

A BIG MONTH FOR SECURING FUTURE ELECTIONS

Kim Wyman being interviewed by KING-5's Natalie Brand
In April, we received official notification from Washington D.C. that nearly $8 million in new federal funding is coming to help Washington state’s elections become even more secure. Our plan for this will likely include upgrading our elections computer firewalls, increasing our IT staffing to improve our cybersecurity expertise, and training county elections officials about potential elections threats and how to spot them.

On April 30th, I sat down with Natalie Brand of KING-TV to discuss a related endeavor: how I’ll be working with National Guard leaders to shape the role they will play in keeping Washington elections secure. You can watch the interview here.

GIVE BIG SEATTLE = GIVE BIG WTBBL

GiveBIG and Seattle Foundation logoMay 9th will be the final run for the Seattle Foundation’s annual GiveBIG one-day online philanthropic campaign, as the Foundation announced last November, and we’re aiming to make it a memorable one for our Washington Talking Book & Braille Library.

WTBBL volunteers and staff are conducting a drive to raise $2,000 in pre-pledged GiveBIG donations, with the goal of reaching $13,000 in total funds raised. That amount would provide a significant boost to WTBBL’s resources — it’s enough to pay for 30 boxes of Braille paper to emboss locally-transcribed books, or 520 copies of books to record and transcribe into Braille!

Although GiveBIG day is still a week away, the Early Giving window opened Thursday, April 26th. This means you (and your friends!) can go to https://www.givebigseattle.org/washington-talking-book-braille-library now and schedule a donation that will hit WTBBL’s contributions count early on GiveBIG morning, getting their BIG day off to a running start.

OFFICE OF SECRETARY OF STATE WEBSITE MAKEOVERS

Secretary of State's home pageAs you might have noticed, we’ve rolled out improved website designs for both the OSOS main page and the Address Confidentiality Program site to make each easier to navigate.
 
The new designs don’t change the depth of content our Internet visitors can access, but both do a much better job of displaying how much material we have available and in helping users find the information they’re searching for much more quickly.

BILLS, BILLS, BILLS — BY THE HUNDREDS!

Stacks of bills waiting to be chaptered.
As part of our office’s Constitutional duties (see Article III, Section 17), OSOS is responsible for recording all bills passed by the Legislature that become law (with or without the Governor’s signature) into state law books.

 At the end of every legislative session, hundreds of brand-new laws come into our office for the official action of being put into a chapter of session law.

For our hard-working staff, that means an avalanche of papers to sort, stack, and file properly with little to no room for error. As the photo shows, our staff’s work getting the new laws “chaptered” necessitated spreading them all the way across the executive office’s meeting room table several evenings in March and April.

LEGACY’S WORLD WAR II EXHIBIT OPENS IN ORTING

Secretary Wyman meeting with WWII veterans.
On April 11th, I joined our Legacy Washington crew at the unveiling of the Washington Remembers World War II exhibit at the Washington Soldiers Home in Orting.

With the passage of time, the knowledge of what it was like to endure World War II is fading from living memory, which makes Legacy’s work to capture diverse perspectives on the war a mission of vital importance.

Copyright © 2018 Washington Secretary of State, All rights reserved.


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