Secretary of State Debra Bowen

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:

• Plays a key role in making government more transparent by providing public access to a wide range of corporate, Uniform Commercial Code, campaign finance, lobbying and election records. Her office also maintains online editions of the California Lobbyist Directory and the California Roster of federal, state and local government officials.
• Grants the authority to do business in California by approving articles of incorporation, registering other business entities, and registering trademarks, trade names, and service marks.
• Provides online resources and services to businesses through the California Business Portal, a website that easily connects people to important business documents and handbooks, searchable lists of registered businesses, a step-by-step guide to starting a business and assistance for international businesses looking to operate in California. The Secretary of State also appoints and commissions notaries public, files oaths of office for non-civil service government officers and employees, and administers the Victims of Corporate Fraud Compensation Fund (VCFCF), which provides restitution to victims who are unable to collect on a corporate fraud judgment.
• Maintains the Domestic Partners Registry, the Advance Health Care Directive (AHCD) Registry and the Safe at Home program. Currently, same-sex couples, regardless of the age of the partners, and opposite-sex couples in which one partner is at least 62 years old may register as domestic partners in California by filing a Declaration of Domestic Partnership with the Secretary of State. An AHCD allows a person to indicate to their loved ones and medical providers their medical treatment preferences if they can't speak or make decisions for themselves. The AHCD may also designate someone else to make decisions regarding medical treatment. AHCDs and related information can be stored with the AHCD Registry, and that information can be provided upon request to the registrant's health care provider, public guardian or legal representative. Safe at Home's confidential address program helps protect the identities of survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking victims and people who work with reproductive health care clinics, enabling these Californians to safely receive mail and register to vote while protecting themselves and their children at home and at school.
• Keeps the complete record of the official acts of the Legislature and executive departments of the state government, and is charged with the custody of the Constitution, the state archives and the Great Seal of California.

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, Deputy Director for Energy and Climate in the Office of Environmental Markets at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Above taken from the bio on her official State website (as of 6/28/2010)