Iowa voter turnout in 2014 highest for midterm election in at least 30 years

DES MOINES - More Iowans voted in the 2014 elections than in any previous midterm election in at least three decades, according to the official vote count certified Monday.

A total of 1,142,311 Iowans voted last month, according to the official canvass that was certified Monday by the state Executive Council. That is more voters than in any of Iowa's previous non-presidential elections dating to at least 1982, state officials said.

The 2014 turnout was just up from 2010, when 1,133,434 Iowans voted.

Gov. Terry Branstad said the more than 666,000 votes he received were the most ever in any of his six election victories in Iowa.

'I do have an interest in knowing whether this is the biggest turnout,” Branstad said during Monday's Executive Council meeting.

Officials plan to continue searching through older records to determine whether the 2014 elections set the state's all-time raw voter turnout record.

Turnout for the election was 53.3 percent, which was up slightly from the 2010 and 2006 midterm elections. Turnout in 2002 was 56 percent.

The highest turnout among the state's 99 counties was in Ringgold County in south central Iowa, where two-thirds of registered voters - 66.2 percent - cast a ballot.

Sioux County at 63.7 percent and Fayette County at 63.3 percent had the next-highest turnouts.

Pottawattamie County in west central Iowa had the lowest turnout at 42.8 percent. Fremont County had 43.9 percent turnout, and Lee County 45.2 percent.

Sarah Reisetter, the Iowa secretary of state's elections director, said there were no recounts this year. The smallest margin was in northeast Iowa, where Republican Darrel Branhagen defeated Democrat Rick Edwards by just 27 votes in an open-seat Iowa House race.

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