Excerpt:

Californian Tommy Gong is the deputy county clerk-recorder for Contra Costa County which is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and home to over 700,000 registered voters. He has been an election administrator for over two decades, having served in other California counties including San Luis Obispo and Stanislaus.

Gong, who is not affiliated with any political party, has received wide recognition throughout his tenure as an election official. He led efforts to coordinate communication tactics to increase public trust in election processes across the Bay Area by forming the Coalition of Bay Area Election Officials. This initiative received awards from the National Association of Election Officials and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

He is also an advisory board member for the Election Official Legal Defense Network, a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Task Force on Elections, a member of the Election Workforce Advisory Council, and is on the board of directors for the California Voter Foundation.

Outside of his passion for election administration, Gong is enthusiastic about practicing and teaching martial arts. He has served on the board of directors of the Bruce Lee Foundation and wrote the book, “Bruce Lee: The Evolution of a Martial Artist,” which was published in 2014.

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Issue One: Many people are surprised to learn that the federal government doesn’t routinely fund the costs of running elections. Why do you think the federal government should routinely contribute to election administration costs? What steps are you and your colleagues taking to secure sustainable state or federal funding for elections, and how do you balance competing budget priorities? Can you speak to how the needs of smaller counties differ from larger ones in terms of resources, staffing, and challenges?

Tommy Gong: It starts by understanding who we are allowed to bill for election services and by examining our billing methodology. What’s interesting about the local jurisdictions –  such as cities, school districts, special districts – that we bill for election services, is that it wouldn’t necessarily be fair for them to pay for the federal and state portion of the election. The federal government or the state government should be reimbursing us for their share so you have to allocate what those costs would be.

I’ve been doing a lot of studying of this over the last year and a half and it’s staggering to see what amount of that is attributed to the federal and state governments, especially the state when you think about a gubernatorial cycle when you’re electing all of the state officers and you might have 18 state propositions, for example, on the ballot. That would be a lot of ballot real estate. Rightfully, the state should be paying a larger percentage of the costs, but yet they don’t. It’s a huge challenge and it needs to be very well coordinated.

That needs to start at the state level, where localities are all governed by the same election laws. The 58 counties, through our state association, need to huddle together to come up with a game plan. This plan should include partners such as the state association of counties and the state legislative analyst office to determine state election costs and how they could be reimbursed to the counties.

The federal component is a tougher nut to crack because now you’re dealing with 50 different states. Now, if we all had the same methodology, that would be great, but I’m not sure that we do. That’s what makes it really challenging.

I think hesitancy for funding for elections from the federal or state government is that it will come with strings attached such as new legislation that would cost more for the counties. At the national level, this happened with HAVA in 2002. And the nuances in terms of creating a budget and competing with other priorities at the county level can be very challenging.

When you look at the budget process [in California], the County Administrator takes direction from the County Commissioners or the County Board of Supervisors, and oftentimes they are going to set the budget priorities for the county. Public safety is going to be number one. Then you might have things like road infrastructure or health services and things like that. Elections end up further down on the totem pole. When it comes down to dollars and cents, we get a smaller slice of the pie than others do. When you scale down regarding county size, it makes it even more difficult for the smaller jurisdictions to make do with even less, we all have the same things to accomplish.

Smaller jurisdictions may not have as much as many voters, but they still have a lot of the same processes and procedures to accomplish. (Full Story)