Issue 09 | August 2025

Linda Farmer and Washington's Election Certification: Done Nationally, "In-Progress" at Home

Only four of Washington's elected county auditors are listed "In-Progress" rather than certified on the state's election-administrator certification report. Linda Farmer is one of them. In her own office, all 13 election staff are certified; she is the only person in Pierce County on the state's list without it.

Washington certifies the people who run its elections. Through the Secretary of State, the state's Election Administrator Certification is built around Washington election law and the state's all-mail voting system. It requires an Elections 101 orientation, a certification exam, 40 hours of training, and two years of continuous service, much of it earnable inside the state, including at the annual Washington elections conference.

Washington has 39 counties. Thirty-eight elect a County Auditor, and King County instead elects a Director of Elections. Read together, the Secretary of State's Certified Administrators Report, obtained under public records request 26-1032, and the state's February 2026 certified administrator list account for 32 of those 39 elected officials. Twenty-eight hold Full Certification. Four are listed as "In-Progress," with no certification year on record. The remaining seven counties have office staff on the reports but no row for the elected auditor, so the records obtained establish no status for those officials either way.

Linda Farmer is one of the four. The other three are the elected auditors of Columbia, Kittitas, and Whitman counties, among the smallest in the state. Pierce is by far the largest county whose elected auditor has not completed the certification.

Her own office sharpens the contrast. All 13 Pierce County election staff on the report hold Full Certification, with initial years from 2010 to 2023, every one maintained in 2025. Linda Farmer is the only person in Pierce County on the state's list without it.

To be clear about the law, this is not a violation. Washington requires that "not less than two persons of the auditor's office" be certified, a requirement on the office, not on the elected auditor personally. With 13 certified staff, Pierce County is comfortably compliant, and the statute that creates the program sets no personal deadline for anyone.

That is exactly why the comparison matters. Twenty-eight elected county auditors completed a certification none of them were required to complete. It is a voluntary professional norm, and the Pierce County Auditor sits outside it.

What Farmer did complete, in August 2025, is a national credential: the Certified Elections/Registration Administrator, or CERA, designation, offered through Auburn University's public-administration faculty in partnership with The Election Center. Pierce County publicized it as "the nation's top election official certification," and she lists "APR, CERA" after her name.

The national program is national by design. CERA requires 12 core courses of 10.5 hours each, delivered at Election Center events around the country, plus attendance at national conferences, and can be completed over as long as 12 years. By its structure, it involves repeated out-of-state travel.

So the priorities question is simple, and it needs no dollar figure to land. Pierce County's elected Auditor completed an out-of-state national credential, while the in-state certification built specifically for Washington's elections, the one 28 of her peers and all 13 of her own staff have finished, remains, on the state's own record, "In-Progress."

This site publishes what the records document. The certification status here comes directly from Washington's Certified Administrators Report. Who paid for the national program, and how much, is the subject of a separate public-records request; we will add that once the county's payment records are in hand.

Article and Record Links