A pioneer in open government reform, election integrity, and personal privacy rights, Debra Bowen became only the sixth woman in California history elected to a statewide constitutional office when she was elected as Secretary of State in November 2006.
As the chief elections officer for the largest state in the nation, Secretary Bowen is responsible for overseeing state and federal elections, a role that also requires her to test and certify the voting equipment used in California. Her goal is to ensure that voting machines certified for use in Californians elections are secure, accurate, reliable, and accessible, and every voter's ballot is counted exactly as it was cast. In her first year in office, Secretary Bowen commissioned an independent, top-to-bottom review of voting technology, as well as a comprehensive review of the state's decades-old election auditing standards. Following the top-to-bottom review, Bowen strictly limited the use of direct recording electronic voting machines, and imposed significant security and auditing requirements on systems used in California elections. Secretary Bowen was recognized for her national leadership in election integrity with the 2008 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage AwardTM, the nation's most prestigious honor for elected public servants who choose principles over partisanship.
Secretary Bowen is also responsible for helping to carry out election laws and campaign disclosure requirements by maintaining a statewide database of registered voters, certifying the official lists of candidates for each election, tracking and certifying ballot initiatives, compiling election returns, and certifying the election results for all state and federal contests.
Beyond her role as the state's chief elections officer, Secretary of State Bowen is charged with managing a number of other programs for the people of California. She is committed to carrying out all of her responsibilities in an open, transparent fashion that opens up government and builds people's confidence in our democracy. As Secretary of State, Bowen:
First elected in 1992 to represent the 53rd Assembly District in west Los Angeles County, Secretary Bowen served three terms before being elected to represent the 28th Senate District in 1998. She then served two terms in the Senate until she was elected Secretary of State in 2006.
During her time in the Legislature, Secretary Bowen chaired the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee for two years, the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee for six years, and the Assembly Natural Resources Committee for two years. At the national level, she chaired the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) E-Communications Steering Committee, served three years on NCSL's Executive Board, and was California's appointee to the NCSL Task Force on State and Local Taxation of Telecommunications and Electronic Commerce.
As a legislator, Secretary Bowen authored a number of election-related laws designed to build public confidence in voting systems, including measures to require all election results to be audited using the paper record produced by the electronic voting machines and requiring all audits to be conducted in public and include vote-by-mail and early-voting ballots.
Secretary Bowen is a longtime advocate of personal privacy and government transparency, especially through her groundbreaking use of the Internet to open government to computer users worldwide. In 1993, she authored the first-in-the-world law that put legislative information online, giving the public Internet access to information about California bills, committee analyses, state legislators' voting records and much more. The law has served as a model for other U.S. states and countries. Secretary Bowen was also the first California lawmaker to voluntarily put her campaign finance reports online in 1995, well before all candidates for state office had to post that information online in 2000.
Secretary Bowen also authored landmark consumer protection laws to protect people from becoming identity theft victims and worked with community-based groups to close the digital divide. Those laws make it more difficult for criminals to commit identity theft by banning businesses, schools, universities and government agencies from using social security numbers as public identifiers, requiring credit card numbers to be removed from receipts kept by merchants, giving people the right to freeze access to their credit reports and giving people the tools to fight back against unsolicited email and fax advertising.
Secretary Bowen was born in Rockford, Illinois, and graduated from Michigan State University in 1976. After earning her law degree at the University of Virginia, she practiced corporate, tax and ERISA law at Winston & Strawn in Chicago and in Washington, D.C., at the Los Angeles office of Wall Street firm Hughes, Hubbard & Reed; and as a sole practitioner in Los Angeles. Bowen first volunteered her legal services as a member of the Heal the Bay Legal Committee, and eventually her practice grew to include environmental and land use cases, as well as tax and business matters.
Secretary Bowen is married to Mark Nechodom, a research scientist and Director of Climate Science Policy with the U.S. Forest Service.
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Updated May 2008
