The Hatch Act forbids him from serving in a partisan office while a member of the federal workforce. 1 to ensure he was compliant with federal law. He quit his job with the military's Defense Logistics Agency on Aug. The February race saw Mockler capture 24 votes more than Simpson and drove him to run for auditor. Though he still won that rematch against Mockler by two, a judge concluded the race would have to be run again because of the error, made by a veteran employee of the auditor's office who was redrawing precinct lines. It was also an error that Simpson himself had brought up with the auditor's office months before the vote. And in that race, almost 400 ballots went to neighborhoods near Kitsap Way and Forest Ridge Park that shouldn't have been voting in Simpson's race. That ultimately resulted in a new election for his seat in 2021.
Though present at City Council meetings online during the pandemic, Simpson's work for the Navy in Yokosuka, Japan, was a distance too far away to be able to represent the city, according to some of his fellow council members.
Prior to going to work at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in 2018, Simpson worked as a private contractor, as a corrections officer for the Kitsap County Jail and a patrol officer for the Kitsap County Sheriff's Office. "They braved machine guns and explosions so they could vote," Simpson said. He uses the example of a pot of soup to show how random sampling by the office can ensure overall election integrity. "Your job is to help people."Īndrews said he's worked to make elections secure and accurate in Kitsap, performing forensic testing not just on elections but the equipment that runs them. "You're an ambassador to Kitsap County as a whole," said Andrews, who first ran for Kitsap County Assessor in 2014 but lost to Phil Cook. But it also exposed him to other local governments, Kitsap's tribes and businesses that he says gave him the experience to run the auditor's office. Working as an administrator in GIS gave him an opportunity to work with surveyors, emergency responders and even the sheriff's office on combing data to find crime trends. "This seemed like the place I needed to be," he said. But enveloped in a curriculum with lots of math, he was drawn to land surveying instead and ultimately got a job in geographic information systems (GIS) in Pierce County.Īt a time when governments were beginning a long voyage to convert from "a paper environment to an all-digital platform," Andrews got drawn in 1995 to Kitsap County, where departments from the assessor to auditor were working collaboratively toward a GPS-based system. "People don't trust them if they don't know they're accurate 100 percent of the time." Andrews: From data analyst to auditorĪndrews, who graduated from Silas (then-Wilson) High School in Tacoma, had early plans to be an architect. "Our ballots are just like a parachute," Simpson said.
He used the example of when he jumped out of planes with the Army: every fifth parachute was packed by someone making the jump, to ensure they were confident enough to use each of the chutes themselves. The county added drop boxes to make voting easier, cameras to the auditor's office's ballot room and began live streaming all its public meetings.īut Simpson, an Army veteran who is quitting his federal service job to run in the race, believes the office could be doing more to increase election security. Andrews, 54, points to three years and 15 elections that soldiered on "securely and transparently" through a global pandemic.
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