July 2020
By the time state lawmakers in Iowa went home at 6 am on June 24, the night had turned stealthily into Sunday morning and the Republican majority in both the House and Senate could close the books on an unusual and unanticipated election law. The law prohibits the Secretary of State from mailing registered voter applications for absentee ballots (ABRs) for November’s election until voters apply for it and provide IDs.
The legislature added a provision that if election officials detect errors or omissions in a voter’s application, the officials are to contact the voter by phone or electronically within 24 hours. The officials can’t cross-check records in their office. The law doesn’t address this, but presumably, if the voter isn’t reached or doesn’t correct the form in a day, the voter is disqualified from voting absentee. There is nothing in the law that indicates if a voter will be notified that the application didn’t go through.
All that was needed was for the Governor, a Republican, to sign the bill into law. She did, and the law is now in effect.
The law was enacted only three weeks after the state’s primary for all offices other than president. (The Iowa caucuses held back in February involve only the presidential race.) The primary on June 2 attracted 530,000 voters, by far the most in any Iowa primary, this despite the pandemic. Much of the success goes to the absentee ballot process triggered by the Secretary of State who mailed absentee applications to all registered voters without being asked. Mail-in ballots made up 80% of all the voting.
The process was seamless. Voters had ballots at home. All they needed to do was complete them and mail them in. No lines that threatened people’s health. No long waits on election night to get the vote totals.
It was so successful that Republican strategists in and outside Iowa saw the writing on the ballots. As the Des Moines Register put it, the only possible justification for the legislature’s overnight stunt, which passed along party lines, is “voter suppression.”
It fell in line as part of Donald Trump’s clear strategy – if you can’t beat ‘em, complicate the voting or rig the election, whichever is needed. During this year’s primary season, states have already rejected tens of thousands of mail-in ballots, according to NBC News. The reasons cited are ballots tossed out for such trivial errors as not signing in all the right places, using a signature that doesn't exactly match one's voter registration signature, or reaching election officials too late.
Iowa presents as a red state. A red state, though, shouldn’t need to resort to voter suppression. As Iowans often say, the GOP has won the trifecta. They control the state House, the state Senate and the governorship. Together, they make the rules even for national elections. It has not always been that way, and barring tactics to undermine the election, it’s not likely to continue that way.
Democratic presidential candidates have won six of the last eight presidential races in Iowa; including Michael Dukakis’s victory in 1988. The exceptions were in 2004 when George Bush won in seeking a second term, and in 2016 when Donald Trump won. The governors for 12 years from 1998-2010 were Democrats.
For 30 years, between 1984 and 2014, Iowa sent one Republican, Chuck Grassley, and one Democrat, Tom Harkin, to the U.S. Senate. After Harkin retired in 2014, Joni Ernst joined Grassley to make the Senate delegation from Iowa all Republican.
When I was in college in Iowa in the 1970s, three U.S. Senate luminaries - Harold Hughes, Dick Clark and John Culver – were all Iowa Democrats.
Since Joni Ernst’s fluke election in 2014 after Tom Harkin retired and Trump’s win two years later, national pundits have colored Iowa red. They wrote off Iowa to the GOP until recent polls showed both Trump and Ernst vulnerable and faltering.
Iowa is of only modest consequence in the presidential race. It controls only six of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
Ernst’s Senate seat is of seismic importance. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, a majority of lockstep voters who defy the president only when it doesn’t matter. Twenty-three seats are up for election. Most of the 23 are considered safe. Polls and pundits differ on how many, and which, are vulnerable, and as the campaign has evolved, the conventional wisdom has moved from five, with Ernst’s Iowa seat considered safe, to 11, with Ernst’s seat shifting to vulnerable as Trump’s ratings drop. If Trump is re-elected and the Democrats lose none of their Senate seats, the Republicans would have to lose four seats to give up control of the body. If Trump loses and the Democrats keep all their Senate seats, three lost Republican seats would turn the Senate and the federal government around.
Joni Ernst’s seat is all the more critical in that she has voted in line with Trump’s positions 91% of the time. Most recently Ernst voiced support for Trump’s deployment of federal troops in Portland and for his handling of the coronavirus epidemic.
Trump has announced many times that he opposes mail-in voting. The last time Ernst addressed the state’s recent stealth absentee ballot law, she deferred, saying that “elections are a state issue.” Her opposition for the Senate, Democrat Theresa Greenfield said, “Republican politicians are trying to make it harder to vote. This is unacceptable and wrong.”
To the extent that Iowa is misperceived as red, its palette is showing its true colors again. Two years ago, in 2018, in the off-year election after Trump became president, Iowa’s four Congressional districts flipped from three Republicans to three Democrats. The fourth Republican has been Stephen King whose racist and vulgar language resulted in fellow Republicans stripping him of House committee assignments before he was defeated in the recent Republican primary.
Iowa is neither red nor blue, but a lush mix of red, blue and independent. There are 680,000 Republicans, 680,000 Democrats and 627,000 independents, as of July. Can it get any more dynamic than that?
That would make for a fair fight for president and U.S. Senate if it weren’t for the wild cards that the GOP has hidden away to spring at any time.
They’ve enacted the laws so that voters will be confused as they await absentee ballot applications as were mailed for the June 2 primary. After a number of the state’s 99 county auditors from Democratic-leaning counties decided to mail out absentee applications as the Secretary of State did for the primary, the Secretary of State returned to the legislature to get permission to take the lead again. He got it.
The Republicans imposed a condition. The ABRs can be sent to registered voters either by the Secretary of State or by the county auditors but the ABRs have to be blank “to ensure uniformity.” The Democrats tried to add a provision that would require election officials to mail voters PIN numbers with or before the ABRs so voters would have the information needed to vote. It was voted down.
One county auditor suggested that to make it easier, he would mail out the ABRs with the individualized PIN numbers already on the ABR form. The Republican lawmaker who leads the GOP in the Iowa Senate was quoted as setting things straight: “With this order, any auditor who sends out the pre-populated form with the Voter ID pin is frankly ignoring the law. Period."
The result is that the confluence of laws is confusing and onerous; ideal conditions for the Trump campaign strategy of challenging people’s votes and claiming the election is illegitimate.
Some county auditors will be lenient about insignificant errors or omissions in a voter’s absentee application. Those who are could be setting up challenges after the election as the Trump campaign works to show that absentee ballots are fraudulent.
Then there will be some county auditors who will vigilantly detect errors or omissions in a voter’s absentee application and then lackadaisically try to contact the voter by phone or electronically within 24 hours. If the voter isn’t contacted and the errors aren’t corrected, there’s nothing in the law that would keep those auditors from not mailing out absentee ballots to those people.
Then there’s the Trump playbook that he’s signaled publicly. After the election, he’s prepared to claim that the absentee ballots are fraudulent and that Iowa’s results, among others, can’t be trusted.
It’s easier to have Iowa to come out red through voter suppression tactics when Iowa is wrongly expected to vote red anyway.
What to do about it? The election bromide is that to make change, people need to vote. This time, in Iowa, and in all states, to vote, people need to be vigilant, know exactly where the pitfalls lurk and avoid them.
As the Register warned in its June 8 editorial headline: “Message from GOP lawmakers to Iowans: We don't want you voting.” Show them you know what they’re up to.
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