Haley Jacobson

I am a native Saint Louisan. I graduated from John Burroughs School and earned both a Bachelors of Arts in Linguistics from Reed College and a Bachelors of Science in Nursing from Goldfarb School of Nursing at Barnes-Jewish College. I earned a certificate in Applied Conflict Transformation from the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies in Cambodia. I worked as a teacher and experiential educator in the US and across Asia before returning to Saint Louis. I then worked for nonprofits focused on equitable development in Saint Louis and was a loan officer with the CDC at the International Institute in Saint Louis before transitioning to emergency medicine and critical care. I currently work full time at both the Saint Louis University Hospital’s Emergency Department and Saint Louis Children’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I have a younger brother and a dog. I spent my childhood playing the cello and played in both the St. Louis Youth Symphony and Missouri All-State Orchestra while in high school. I am enthusiastic about the outdoors and have held a variety of outdoors certificates allowing me to lead students on wilderness trips. I live in the City of Saint Louis.

• My number one goal as Secretary of State is to rebuild the people’s trust in the office. The Secretary of State should be seen as someone who isn’t helping any political party’s agenda but is strictly neutral, focused on ensuring the system works with integrity. I want to run the office so no one can tell whether I ran as a Democratic or Republican candidate. If I can get the people to view the office as fair, neutral, and non-partisan, I will feel a strong measure of success.
• The Secretary of State is the one person most responsible for the integrity of elections and fair, legal access to voting. Local officials who run elections play a crucial role and need protection from improper interference and harassment. Additionally, the Secretary of State is responsible for ensuring ballot measures and elections materials are clearly written, without confusing or misleading language, and without “ballot candy” designed to improperly influence the public. Voters have the right to expect that when they walk into the voting booth or complete an absentee ballot they can clearly understand the measures they are voting on, and can complete their ballots confident they cast their vote for the ideas and people they intended.
• Accumulating capital to invest in one's own future is part of the American dream. It is essential that when working people and small businesses earn money to save and begin to invest, they are not cheated. I plan to focus increased efforts to ensure rules regulating investing and business are both well known and enforced. We cannot protect the public from all bad investments, but we can protect the public from investments and advisors that are dishonest and deceptive. The Secretary of State’s office investigates investor complaints and enforces securities laws to protect the people of Missouri from bad actors. I will focus on expanding education and enforcement so more Missourians feel they can safely participate in securities markets.

I love libraries. I've spent a lot of my life in libraries. The Secretary of State oversees the State Library and our State Archives, and works to support libraries across Missouri. Libraries and our archives are keys to our history, and thus to our present and future. Our public libraries provide convenient meeting places open to all in communities across our state. I will work to support access to information and library programming, finding ways to help libraries acquire materials and engage in interlibrary lending so our rural communities can have access to materials equal to what is available in our major cities.

The Governor makes policy and enforces the laws, and the Lieutenant Governor assists. The legislature makes the laws and passes the budget. Both of these are political functions. The Attorney General and State Auditor work in narrow fields; they are important, but narrow. The Secretary of State, in contrast, is designed to do the day to day work of serving the people of the State. While the other offices can serve political interests or advance the agenda of special interest groups, the office of the Secretary of State is meant to advance the interest of every Missourian, to keep the machinery of government working, and ensuring that all citizens have the structures, regulations, and resources available to them to thrive.

Books on political philosophy with a focus on social contract theory, such as “Two Treatises of Government” (1689) by John Locke.

Integrity, evidence-based practice, and cultivation of healthy and respectful debate. Flexibility of thought and the ability to integrate new information as it arises. This means the ability to change one’s mind when one is wrong. Finally, one must have a commitment to serve the public. This job is all about service to the public.

I have always been a hard worker and a quick learner. I am also good at listening to people. I think these three qualities will help me be a successful officeholder.

The Secretary of State is a public servant. Core responsibilities include ensuring transparency and equitable implementation of business regulations, investments, and elections. The Secretary of State is also the keeper of the state’s archival records and the State Library. We must preserve our history and make it accessible to all. The Secretary of State should promote ethical business practices and expand access to educational opportunities to ensure that all Missourians who want to play an active role in business and democracy in our State have the means and access to do so.

As for my legacy, as I said before, If I can leave people feeling that the Office of the Secretary of State is run in an entirely neutral and non-partisan way, for the benefit of the people and not the politicians or the political parties, I will feel I have done a good job.

September 11th, 2001. I was ten, in elementary school, and our teachers brought our class together to watch the events unfold on television.

While in high school I worked a for a landscaping company, spreading mulch, ripping out invasive plants, digging ponds, laying sod, etc.

Milo from “The Phantom Tollbooth.” With the powers of imagination and empathy, you can create worlds.

I cannot call any part of the Secretary of State’s responsibilities unimportant: tracking corporate filings and U.C.C. filings is vitally important for those who interact with companies or borrowers in our state. But the three functions that come most immediately to mind for me are elections, the State Library and the archives, and finally securities regulations.

Before the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, Missouri and the rest of the territory were governed by Spain. All of the documents from the Spanish colonial period, including the land grants that established the original property owners of the Saint Louis, Ste. Geneviève, and Cape Girardeau regions, were kept in Saint Louis and Madrid, Spain. After Missouri became a State in 1820, all those records in Saint Louis were sent to the Secretary of State in Jefferson City, where they now form the oldest part of our State Archives. I first learned about this historical treasure trove when I was in college, writing a paper about early native peoples in Missouri, when my dad sent me copies of relevant papers from the State Archives. I was fascinated and hooked. I would be honored to be part of this more than two century effort to preserve our earliest historical records and hope that more of us take the opportunity to learn about what is in our archives.

Experience can be beneficial, but I do not think it is necessary, especially when running to head an office like the Secretary of State, which employs a large number of skilled, experienced, and dedicated permanent employees in all of its departments. I believe I am an excellent candidate for this office and I have no experience in government or politics. Instead, I believe a commitment to transparency, service, hard work, and cooperation to be more important than prior experience for this office.

This is an absolute value. While all organizations, businesses, and elected individuals have a responsibility and ethical duty to be accountable to the people they serve, the Government, because of its role as the preeminent servant of the citizens, has a much greater responsibility to be both financially transparent and accountable for how it performs its work. Without transparency, the government becomes less about service to the public and more about the benefit of those on the inside, costing our citizens the benefit of having a government. Without transparency and accountability, the social contract ultimately fails.

I oppose plans to make it more difficult to pass ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments in Missouri. While we have a representative government, I believe it is also important to maintain a degree of direct democracy, which our current process gives us. Our present system has allowed us to pass really beneficial laws that were inspired by our citizens, including allowing stem cell research, regulating puppy mills, guaranteeing the right to farm, funding state parks and conservation, and allowing medical marijuana use and later recreational use. People wanted the law to change; the legislature resisted; the people got what they wanted. I think that is good. If I were to advocate for any change to the system, it would be to shorten the time the state-wide elected offices can take in reviewing proposed initiative titles, preparing summaries and the like, all of which too often appears to be dragged out for the purpose of killing an initiative by delaying its supporters from being able to go out and collect signatures.