In June, hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey, along with Managing Editor Rebecca Smith, traveled to Central and Eastern Europe to learn more about election administration in democracies overseas. In this episode, our hosts take a broad look at democracy in the Republic of Moldova – a small country nestled between Romania and Ukraine that was a part of the former Soviet Union. They speak with Igor Munteanu, the former Moldovan ambassador to the United States and Igor Boțan, the Executive Director of the Association for Participatory Democracy to learn more about the history of this relatively young democracy and explore some of the unique challenges it faces.
In June, hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey, along with Managing Editor Rebecca Smith, traveled to Central and Eastern Europe to learn more about election administration in democracies overseas. In this episode, they speak with Alexander Shlyk, the Special Representative on Elections for Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and the former head of the Elections Department of OSCE ODIHR, or the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Tsikhanouskaya is the leader of the leader of the Belarusian democratic movement who many believe truly won the 2020 election against President Alexander Lukashenko. Shlyk is currently living in exile as one of the 16 people working for Tsikhanouskaya, and he’s working to prepare the legislative and practical framework for democratic elections in Belarus – which he believes will inevitably happen.
In June, hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey, along with Managing Editor Rebecca Smith, traveled to Central and Eastern Europe to learn more about election administration in democracies overseas. In this episode, they speak with Dr. Irena Hadžiabdić with the Bosnia and Herzegovina Central Election Commission about the state of democratic collaboration in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as some of the challenges like disinformation and harassment of female election officials that Bosnia and Herzegovina is facing. You can find the election e-portal for citizens living abroad that Dr. Hadžiabdić mentions at https://eizbori.izbori.ba/.
In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Judd Choate, the Director of the Division of Elections for the Colorado Department of State about the voter-centric election system in the state – a nearly all vote-by-mail model. In 2013, Colorado passed “The Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act of 2013,” which requires ballots to be mailed to every registered voter for most elections.
In the second of a two-part exploration, hosts Brianna Lennon and Eric Fey take a look at resource allocation and how that differs between cities of different sizes. In this episode, they speak with Dean Logan, the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk of Los Angeles about funding and what it is like to oversee the “most complex county election jurisdiction in the Country” with 5.2 million registered voters.