Election Law Changes Part 4: Stuff That Didn’t Happen

So as you’ve seen the past three days, the election law news from the Iowa legislative session is mostly bad. However, there were a few negative items that got some publicity yet didn’t pass.

The biggest surprise to me was that there was no attempt to ban satellite voting, which I was absolutely certain would happen. Satellite sites are mostly popular in urban Democratic counties, and they only really work in locations that have high population density and foot traffic, so they seemed like a prime target. But the only bill affecting satellites was a brief attempt at a minor restriction on sites in the very smallest city elections.

There was also no serious attempt to end election day registration. A bill was introduced by a few of the farthest right House Republicans but it was never taken up. Fact is, as in every state that allows it, election day registration became very popular immediately. The Krazy Kaucus also introduced a few other far-right fantasies: term limits, a US constitutional convention, and electing the members of the committee that nominates judicial finalists.

In the back and forth between the House and Senate over HF516, an amendment to close the polls at 8 PM, rather than 9 PM, for primary and general elections was dropped – a fact Terry Branstad bemoaned after the bill’s passage.

Cutting the early voting window to 29 days is bad enough. But at one point Senator Rick Bertrand introduced a bill that would have set the first day to vote early at just 15 days before the election.

Brad Zaun’s sore loser bill to abolish party conventions for primaries where no one tops 35 percent, and instead hold an August runoff, passed the Senate unanimously, but the House never took it up. That’s more consideration than Rep. Andy McKean got with a plan to move the primary to September, which would have caused federal problems. Overseas ballots have to be ready 45 days out, and other states that traditionally had September primaries (including New York and Wisconsin) have had to move them early to comply with that federal law.


One bill, aimed straight at Johnson County, would have required the state’s biggest counties to elect supervisors by district. I’ve elaborated much on that in the past. There was also a proposal to let rural townships secede from the largest counties (with the bar once again set right at Johnson County’s 130,000 census total) and join a neighboring county, and a truly bizarre Jarad Klein bill that would have let rural voters cast ballots in city elections. There were a couple of proposals to elect county officials on a non-partisan basis, which died quietly.

A perennial auditor item never came up: setting a hard and fast date deadline for returning absentee ballots. Current law requires a postmark the day before an election, but most local mail is no longer postmarked. Also getting no traction: efforts to allow mail-only elections in the smallest cities. This would save a lot of work for auditors and significant tax money for the small cities, but the concern seems to be setting a precedent for all-vote-by-mail. That would be too popular and make voting too easy, wouldn’t it?