Latest election law changes will work in Iowa

With the clock ticking down on unsigned bills passed in the final days of the 2025 legislative session, Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a pair of election-related bills into law last Monday, June 2.

Recounts streamlined, simplified

House File 928 makes various changes to the recount process for close contests, including limiting recounts to contests separated by a margin of 1 percent or 50 votes, whichever is less. It also reforms recount boards, replacing the former three-person board comprised of candidates’ picks with a larger board of county auditors’ employees with partisan balance.

I like that. I also like that HF 928 requires recounts be conducted by automatic tabulators unless the Iowa Secretary of State deems a hand recount necessary due to “extraordinary circumstances.” As a longtime election official myself, I have long maintained that automatic tabulating devices — which aren’t prone to human error — are vital to swift and accurate ballot counts.

The other bill, House File 954, involves a wider range of election-related changes, most of which are also relatively uncontroversial. They deal with cybersecurity and voter registration record maintenance and paper ballot retention; terms of a county hospital board of trustees and how many signatures are required to protest a newly-certified city budget. Those issues are important, but they probably won’t find themselves at the center of spirited debate.

Other parts will find themselves in a discussion.

‘Trump Rule’ added

Iowa law does not permit a candidate to seek office if they have a previous conviction for a felony “or otherwise infamous crime” and their rights have not been restored by the governor or president. HF 954 clarifies that such disqualification does not apply to federal candidates.

Call that the Trump Rule, of course. As we were reminded in November, there is no federal law that prohibits a felon from running for (and winning) the presidency. States have no business as the arbiters of whether a felon person should be able to run for federal office.

Ding dong, Ranked Choice Voting is dead

HF954 officially prohibits ranked choice voting. Hallelujah and good riddance.

Your friendly neighborhood opinion columnist — and part-time election official — has shuddered for years at the mere idea of furnishing voters with a ballot that looks more like a Scantron bubble sheet than a ballot and instructs voters to rank a pile candidates, most of whom they’ve never even heard of.

Here's a quick exercise to illustrate my point: Ask yourself how many presidential candidates were on the ballot in Iowa in November 2024. Then ask yourself how you would have been prepared to rank all seven of them. (Yes, seven.) Chances are, you didn’t even know half of those seven candidates even existed.

RCV advocates posit that instead of marking the ballot for the candidate they desire and awarding victory to the one who wins the most votes, voters should rank all seven candidates — including those with names you've never heard, whose positions are a mystery and whose party affiliations involve names such as "We the People" and "Party for Socialism and Liberation" — and settle for whomever a majority at least finds tolerable, even if they didn’t earn the most votes overall.

Yeah, no.

RCV was never actually prescribed in Iowa Code, so there was no legal pathway for even small jurisdictions like cities or school districts to utilize it. But now that it's proscribed, our statutory language makes clear the intent — we don't want it.

Major parties must actually be major

Call it the Libertarian Clause if you want, but the Libertarian Party of Iowa has bounced back and forth from qualifying as a major party multiple times in just eight years, creating confusion for Libertarian voters and compliance headaches for elections offices.

If a major political party’s top-ticket candidate doesn’t regularly capture just 2 percent of the vote, it isn’t a major political party. HF 954 keeps the requirement that a party whose top-ticket candidate gets 2 percent of the vote in a preceding general election is considered a major party - but adds that the party must meet that threshold for the preceding three general elections. It’s disappointing for Libertarians, but it’s justified.

Citizenship: Verified, but hardly scrutinized

HF 954 requires that the Iowa Secretary of State compare state lists of registered voters with Iowa DOT files identifying noncitizens and create a new “unconfirmed” status of voter registration. Unconfirmed status will apply in two situations: When a voter signs the portion of the voter registration form to affirm U.S. citizenship but nevertheless reports on the form that they are not a citizen; or when the Secretary of State or a county auditor receives “information from a reliable source indicating that the registered voter is not qualified.”

According to HF 954, once a voter with “unconfirmed” status provides evidence that they are qualified to vote, their voter registration will be made active. An outright cancellation of the voter’s registration due to non-citizenship would only occur if “[t]he registered voter submits documentation that indicates that the registered voter is not a citizen of the United States or reports to a state or federal agency that the registered voter is not a citizen of the United States.”

No one’s saying hiccups will never occur. As I wrote in April, some situations were discovered in which (presumably legal) registered voters in Iowa later reported being noncitizens when called for jury duty. Lying on a jury form is a felony, so if the only repercussion is having a valid voter registration canceled until citizenship can be proven, that voter really shouldn’t claim disenfranchisement.

Perhaps the most controversial part of HF 954 is that it adds citizenship status to the list of questions a precinct election official (informally called a poll worker) can legally ask a voter whose qualifications have been challenged.

But before anyone envisions legal voters having their rights violated en masse, it’s vital to consider that citizenship has already been a circumstance over which a voter can be challenged. It’s been that way for the last 18 years — citizenship was one of a list several circumstances over which a voter could be challenged that was added (back) to Iowa Code in April 2007.

Those circumstances had also existed in Iowa Code at periods prior to 2007, and weren’t codified along partisan lines. The 2007 bill that re-added them to Iowa Code was passed unanimously (and, for what it’s worth, when Democrats controlled both chambers of the legislature and the governorship).

Challenges are not made lightly

So, what happens when a voter is challenged? According to Iowa Code, a poll worker may ask the voter some questions to give them a chance to clarify their eligibility. A voter’s answers to those questions could potentially convince the challenger to withdraw their challenge, allowing the voter to proceed as usual. A challenged voter must be allowed to immediately show evidence of their eligibility.

Here's what’s odd: Until HF 954 became law last week, none of the four questions outlined in Iowa Code 49.90 that a poll worker may ask a challenged voter address citizenship, leaving the list of acceptable questions arguably lacking. All HF 954 actually does to change the challenge process is add citizenship status as the fifth question poll workers can pose to a voter being challenged on that very basis.

So, will adding one question about citizenship to a law that already allows a voter to be challenged over their citizenship result in mass disenfranchisement of legal citizen voters? No. Not unless the supposed horde of would-be challengers want to invite legal trouble: Any challenger must sign a form affirming the truthfulness of the information that justifies their challenge and acknowledging the legal consequences for doing so in bad faith. Filing a challenge with false information is an aggravated misdemeanor punishable by up to two years in prison and a big fine.

Anyone dumb enough to issue a challenge because of a person’s accent or skin color would get what they deserve. And it was already that way.

That’s one of several reasons why the concept of challenging a voter for any reason — including citizenship — doesn’t concern me. Aside from the fact that challenges serve the important purpose of preventing illicit votes before they can be cast and that a challenged vote still has a decent likelihood of counting; challenges happen so rarely that most election officials can serve for years or even decades and never have to deal with one.

That fits nicely with the ultimate goal of every election official — a smooth election with no hiccups; where every person is eligible and every eligible person votes. This year’s election bills will only help with that goal.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com

Disclaimer: This article does not reflect the opinions of any Iowa county commissioner of elections or their staff.