{"id":21613,"date":"2024-02-02T21:15:15","date_gmt":"2024-02-02T21:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=21613"},"modified":"2024-02-16T20:18:42","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T20:18:42","slug":"free-and-fair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2024\/02\/free-and-fair\/","title":{"rendered":"Free and Fair"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Laura Billings Coleman \/ Photo by David J. Turner<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Americans gear up for another grueling presidential election season in 2024, a new Pew Research Center poll finds that only 10 percent of us feel hopeful about our political system, while nearly two-thirds of us are exhausted just thinking about it.<\/p>\n

If you see yourself in these statistics, David Maeda \u201987 has a suggestion: Sign up to be an election judge on November 5, and you may find yourself inspired anew by the commitment and coordination it takes to put on a free and fair election. \u201cI tell this to everyone,\u201d regardless of age, race, creed, or partisan leanings, says Maeda, the State of Minnesota\u2019s director of elections since 2019. \u201cIf you\u2019re worried, if you have doubts, then get involved.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

This year, Minnesota\u2019s more than 4,000 election precincts are expected to need up to 30,000 election judges, civic-minded citizens trained to support and safeguard the voting process for the state\u2019s 3.5 million registered voters. But recruiting so many people after the 2021 Capitol attack and in the ongoing climate of election denialism may take a little extra effort.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s never been a harder time to be an election official, with a not insignificant number of Americans who don\u2019t believe elections are fair,\u201d Maeda says. Though the name-calling and threats from voters accusing him of treason for certifying the 2020 election have died down, concerns about how artificial intelligence could imperil the 2024 election are just ramping up. \u201cIt\u2019s very challenging to operate in this environment,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

But being at the center of the nation\u2019s news cycle nearly every November is also energizing for Maeda, a native of Roseville, Minn., who chose Macalester in large part because of its reputation for deep civic engagement. \u201cI was always reading the newspaper and thinking about world events, but it seemed like no one in my high school cared about those things,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I came to visit Macalester, I immediately loved the fact that everyone on campus was talking about politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maeda majored in journalism and history, worked as a sports editor for the Mac Weekly, and hosted his own radio show\u2014a one hour weekly slot featuring nothing but Frank Sinatra. (\u201cI had at least one listener\u2014a woman who worked in the Geography Department who told me she liked it.\u201d) His passion for pop music (he\u2019s seen Bob Dylan in concert forty-nine times) led to a lengthy tenure at St. Paul\u2019s Cheapo Records, which helped him amass a collection of more than 2,000 recordings (more than 200 by Dylan).<\/p>\n

A few years after graduation, he got his first government job as a clerk-typist in the Secretary of State\u2019s office. One of his duties was to drive Secretary Joan Growe around on election night, visiting the office\u2019s two separate locations. Both the buzz and the bureaucracy of election work appealed to Maeda, who went on to a series of election administration posts in Washington and Hennepin counties, before becoming city clerk of Minnetonka in 2007. Returning to the Secretary of State\u2019s office as director of elections in 2019 brought his career full circle.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll admit I liked the story arc of starting in one of the lowliest positions in this organization, and then coming back years later in a leadership position,\u201d says Maeda, who recently finished writing a memoir including a chapter about his life in election work. As a Japanese American whose father\u2019s family was forced into an internment camp in Idaho during World War II, \u201cIt\u2019s not lost on me that my grandparents would be astounded that they would have a grandson who can serve in a position like this,\u201d he says. \u201cMany of us in this profession see this work not necessarily as a calling, but as something that is fundamental to our democracy. The people who get into this field feel this deeply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maeda is also an elections leader nationally, serving as the secretary to the board of the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonpartisan organization of twenty-four states and the District of Columbia aimed at both increasing voter registration and removing ineligible voters from state rolls. While Minnesota already leads the nation in turnout (with 79.57 percent of eligible voters casting a ballot in 2020), a host of new laws passed in 2023 may help even more residents get to the polls, including a new pre-registration program for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, restored voting rights for more than 50,000 individuals who have already served their time for felony convictions, and new protections for voters who need time off from work to cast a ballot. Maeda is especially enthusiastic about a new automatic voter registration program, similar to Colorado\u2019s, linking Driver and Vehicle Services documents to voting records. When individuals get a driver\u2019s license, they are automatically registered to vote.<\/p>\n

While post-election reviews continue to show Minnesota\u2019s election systems are sound, Maeda says that every cycle presents new challenges. Minnesota\u2019s 2008 Senate recount \u201cmeant I had to become much more versed in litigation,\u201d he says, while 2016 cyberattacks elevated security protocols, and the pandemic in 2020 meant \u201cwe had to become public health experts, too.\u201d This year, disinformation campaigns are high on election officials\u2019 radar, one reason Maeda is encouraging voters to get their ballot information directly from the Secretary of State\u2019s website or from their county\u2019s election office.<\/p>\n

Still, Maeda says, the greatest threat to democracy in November is not showing up. \u201cVote in every election,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s the most important thing you can do.\u201d<\/p>\n

St. Paul writer Laura Billings Coleman is a frequent contributor to <\/em>Macalester Today.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Maeda \u201987, Minnesota\u2019s director of elections, can\u2019t wait to see you at the polls.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":881,"featured_media":21617,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-community-engagement"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":false,"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/881"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21613"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21625,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21613\/revisions\/21625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}