Three years later, in June of 2023, Whipple clinched a goal that many election deniers have pursued: He took over the local office that runs elections. When the longtime Democratic auditor of Iowa’s Warren County retired before finishing her term, Whipple, a businessman, applied for the job and the all-GOP board of supervisors appointed him. In this role, Whipple was set to oversee voter registration, handle ballots, and process results during next year’s presidential race. 

Intent on stopping that from happening, local Democrats collected thousands of signatures in a brief two-week window and forced a special election for auditor. (In Iowa, local vacancies only trigger a special election if there’s such a petition drive.) Although the county located south of Des Moines has zoomed to the right over the last decade—from backing Barack Obama in 2008 to supporting Trump by 17 percentage points in 2020—Democrats still bet that Whipple was out-of-step with most voters there. 

“We’re living in this constant fear that we’re losing our democracy, and here was an actionable thing that you could respond to,” Jim Culbert, head of the local Democratic Party, told Bolts.

This organizing paid off, and voters on Tuesday resoundingly ousted Whipple. 

Democrat Kimberly Sheets, who already worked for the office as a deputy auditor, defeated him 67 to 33 percent. The special election’s margin marks a big turnaround from the county’s recent red lean. “The people of Warren County stood up for our democracy and said with one voice: we trust competence over conspiracies,” Sheets said in a statement after her win. 

Kedron Bardwell, a professor who teaches about conspiracy theories at Simpson College, in Warren County, found and helped expose Whipple’s social media posts after he was appointed in June. “I thought by posting those I was doing my part to inform voters and hopefully motivating some of them to do something about it,” he told Bolts. “I think the pushback was stronger than even I had thought.”

“I’m excited to see that Warren County voters were not willing to abide by these types of views that cast doubt on elections, that spread unfounded conspiracies about them, particularly when the responsibility of that role is so directly related to election security,” he added. “I’m hopeful that this is indicative of a trend that people will continue to push back against folks that try to lie about the last election.”

Whipple’s defeat is the latest in a string of losses for election deniers seeking to have a hand in election administration. They fell short in many secretary of state races in swing states in 2022, and voters in May recalled a local clerk in Michigan in June. But election deniers have also scored some important wins, including four secretary of state offices in red states last year. This spring, Republicans in Pennsylvania doubled down on election deniers running for re-election as county commissionners; a fake Trump elector is now coasting to a new term in the county that includes Pittsburgh. 

Whipple’s ouster in Iowa concludes a month that began with a somewhat similar election in Snohomish County, one of Washington state’s most populous counties. Robert Sutherland, a former Republican lawmaker, was running to take over local election administration. “Prepare for war,” he’d urged his followers on Facebook in late 2020, and even encouraged Trump to use military force to hold onto the presidency. He then used his position in the legislature to sponsor restrictive bills, network with election deniers nationwide, and demand an audit of state results. 

Unlike Iowa’s Warren County, Washington’s Snohomish County is reliably Democratic, and the odds of Sutherland winning the auditor’s election were low. Still, local observers told Bolts that they thought the conservative vote may be enough to carry Sutherland to the November general election, enabling him to spread his conspiracist message for three more months. 

But Sutherland was eliminated by coming in third in the Aug. 1 nonpartisan primary. 

One day after this Snohomish County primary, Trump was indicted by federal prosecutors for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Two weeks later, he was indicted as part of a separate investigation in Georgia for trying to overturn that state’s results. 

Warren County’s special election on Tuesday was the first test for Trump’s Big Lie conspiracies since these new criminal charges. 

Republicans still closed ranks around Whipple. The head of the local GOP said of Whipple that “he’s just got questions about the 2020 election.” U.S. Representative Marianette Miller-Meeks, who represents the county in Congress, went door-to-door to convince voters to support him.

Whipple himself responded to the local furor by deleting past social media posts. He walked back some of his false claims and called the attention to his 2020 statements a “fear tactic.” But the BBC also reported this month that he was continuing to fan rumors of suspicious activity by local poll workers. “It makes me think there’s smoke here,” he said. “So let me go investigate the fire.” (Bolts has extensively reported about the threats faced by local poll workers due to lies about their behavior.)

But the GOP did not succeed at activating the county’s recently reliable partisanship in favor of their candidates, and Democrats registered a rare win in this area. 

According to Bleeding Heartland, a website that covers Iowa politics, the turnout rate was three times higher than the previous record for a special election in Warren County. Preliminary evidence suggests that Democrats were especially energized to vote in the auditor race.

Culbert says the publicity around Whipple’s conspiracist statements mobilized his party’s base and also worried many independents. 

“There’s been a perception that Democrats can’t win in this county, period, and that led to an arrogance and laziness on the board of supervisors’ part to think that everything they did was fine because there could be no challenge to them,” he added, vowing that his party would work to build on Tuesday’s results next year when the board of supervisors will be on the ballot.

A much bigger test for the Big Lie is already looming, also in Iowa: In five months, Republicans in the state will launch the GOP’s presidential nomination fight, and Trump (who has never even conceded his loss in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, saying without evidence that U.S. Senator Ted Cruz “stole it”) is widely leading in the polls. A win in the caucuses would reinforce his status as the favorite to secure the Republican nomination to take on Biden in 2024. 

In Warren County at least, Whipple won’t be the one overseeing that potential rematch.

The post An Iowa County Just Stopped An Election Denier from Overseeing 2024 Election appeared first on Bolts.

Joel Miller, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state, has a unique vantage point on the challenges to election administration from his current role as auditor of Linn County, Iowa’s second-largest county by population. He opposed these changes in 2021, and was joined not only by his fellow Democratic county auditors, but also many Republican auditors who argued the GOP was needlessly making voting harder in Iowa.

Conspicuously absent from the crowd of Republican election officials decrying these changes was Paul Pate, the incumbent secretary of state and Miller’s opponent in November. He told The Cedar Rapids Gazette at the time that he would enforce election laws but not weigh in during their crafting. 

Miller told Bolts in an interview this week that the office demands a leader who will disavow voter restrictions.

Bolts also spoke with Miller about voting rights for incarcerated people, intimidation of election officials and whether telling the truth alone is enough to combat those who spread lies about democracy. Worried that election denialism is roiling Iowa, Miller says his office has seen an unusual spike in the number of challenges it receives to people’s voter registrations, much like local election offices in Georgia.

You say you want to “make voting easy again.” Was there a time when you felt it was easier to vote in Iowa than it is today?

When I talk about making voting easy again, I’m talking about the estimated 900,000 Iowans who have not yet voted since 2020, and they are going to find it’s not as easy to vote in 2022 as it was in November of 2020.

It used to be much easier in 2016 for people to vote by mail and also to vote in person. We had 40 days of early voting in 2016 and it moved to 29 days in 2017 and now we’re down to 20 days. I think we went from having the third-longest period of early voting in 2016 to now being somewhere in the middle of the pack. We also can’t mail ballots until the 20th day out from the election, where it used to be 29 days before 2021, and 40 days before 2017.

Another deadline that was moved up is the last day that we (county elections offices) can receive a request for an absentee ballot. That went from three days before the election in 2016 to 10 days, and then to 15 days after the 2021 law. In the June 22 primary in Iowa, in my county, 101 people missed that three day deadline, and 51 of them did not vote. The result of that is people cannot procrastinate anywhere in the process. The timelines are just too short, and that also puts a strain on the auditor’s office.

All these deadlines result in people getting disenfranchised. Another way to put it is that voting was made to be very inconvenient if you tend to vote early or you tend to vote by mail.

Which people, or what interests, stand to benefit from a system with these obstacles?

There’s a stereotype that exists among Iowans, and you can see it in the numbers as well, that Republicans tend to vote on election day. Since 2000, the Democratic Party has pushed the idea of voting by mail and voting early. That advantage, or disadvantage, was wiped out during the pandemic, when over two-thirds of voters, regardless of party, decided to vote early or vote by mail in the November 2020 general election, thus resulting in a record turnout. But with the return to normalcy, I expect that Republicans will once again choose to vote on election day. 

So you’re saying these rules can be used to make voting easier for people, to meet them where they’re at, or weaponized to preserve Republican power.

I believe that’s happening, to preserve Republican power. They don’t like that the demographics of Iowa are changing. They don’t like that people immigrating into the state are going to be more pro-Democratic than pro-Republican. So this is an attempt by them to hold onto power for 10 more years by stacking the deck. 

Keep in mind that 68 auditors (in the Iowa State Association of County Auditors) are Republicans: Our organization was unified in its opposition to the laws passed in 2021 to restrict voting. But the current secretary of state was not there to back us up.

After the November 2020 election, he said it was the best election we’d ever had, the most secure, the highest integrity. He was praising us for a job well done, and national figures were praising Iowa for the job we did. So it was a complete surprise, after coming off all the kudos we received in November 2020, that this election legislation was introduced in the spring of 2021. Not only introduced but debated and basically on the governor’s desk in a 7-10-day timeframe.

As secretary of state, I would have used the bully pulpit to talk every day about what was wrong with that bill, about how it was going to make voting more inconvenient and decrease voter turnout and end up disenfranchising people.

Have you seen any impact of Big Lie politics on the ground in Iowa? How has it affected your job as county auditor?

Let me tell you a factual impact: About ten days ago I received 119 voter registration challenges in Linn County. There’s a news report that a neighboring county received about 570 challenges. To put this in perspective, in my previous 15 years as auditor, I received three. 

County clerks and election administrators all around the country have reported increased threats and intimidation since the 2020 election. What would you do to support people who work in election administration?

Well, for example, the former Scott County auditor resigned because of threats. The 99 county auditors are forced to be the ones responsible for responding to this. We should have a unified message as to what’s going on here, and it starts with disavowing the people that have created this havoc. This isn’t supposed to be about someone keeping a job. It’s about doing what’s right for the public, what’s right for the voters, regardless of the consequences to us as individual elected officials. 

According to The Sentencing Project, there are some 34,000 people in Iowa who are disenfranchised either because they’re in prison, on probation or on parole. Do you believe they should have voting rights in Iowa?

I believe everyone should have voting rights, every eligible US citizen. That includes if you’re in prison. I’ve worked for 15 years trying to get everyone to vote, and it would include those people as well. I want everyone engaged in the voting process, because I think there’s a better chance the supporters of the loser will accept the result if we have a high voter turnout. So, why not have a high voter turnout so that it’s really a democratic result?

Isn’t that wishful thinking, given the demonstrated willingness of so many people in positions of power, up to and including the former president, to say that if they don’t win, an election was rigged?

It takes good people that are being silenced to stand up to the election deniers. Educated people who should know right and wrong are standing on the sidelines and not saying anything. So, is it wishful thinking? Well, a wish is just a goal without a timeline. We need to put a deadline on these things. That’s why I’m running. I cannot stand on the sideline and not say something about what’s happening to our elections in Iowa.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Iowa Secretary of State Candidate Vows to Fight New Barriers to Voting appeared first on Bolts.

State advocates have long called for Iowa to expand voting rights. In recent months, Black Lives Matter activists protested in the state capitol, urging Reynolds to take action. 

The order is a temporary fix since a future governor could rescind it. Reynolds has called on the legislature to adopt a constitutional amendment to expand voting rights, to no avail. 

It is also a partial one. The order keeps people convicted of certain crimes disenfranchised for life, a practice the vast majority of states have ended, and it requires people to finish all terms of their sentence, including incarceration, probation and parole, before their rights can be restored. 

“When someone serves their sentence and pays the price our justice system has set for their crimes, they should have their right to vote restored automatically,” Reynolds, a Republican, said in her announcement Wednesday. 

Before Reynolds’s order, Iowa was the only state in the country that enforced a permanent voting ban on all people with felony convictions. (Other states have lifetime voting bans for people convicted of some, but not all, felonies and disenfranchise large numbers of people.) 

The rule disproportionately impacted Black Iowans. Just 4 percent of Iowa’s population is Black, but Black people made up 13 percent of the state’s disenfranchised population in the 2016 presidential election, according to a report by the Sentencing Project.

Wednesday’s order also sets up a process for restoring voting rights to people who meet the requirements moving forward. But the order excludes those convicted under Iowa’s Chapter 707 homicide criminal code section, including manslaughter and voluntary manslaughter, or those with special lifetime sentences for sexual crimes. 

Most states have ended all lifetime disenfranchisement rules, but some have exemptions. Reynolds’s carve-outs are considerably narrower than those implemented by Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, who issued an otherwise comparable executive order in December. (Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s former Democratic governor, had no carve-outs at all in the executive order he issued restoring people’s rights post-sentence in 2015.) 

Other states have taken bolder steps to expand their electorate over the past year. Washington D.C. has abolished felony disenfranchisement altogether, including for people who are in prison, and Colorado, Nevada, and New Jersey have restored the voting rights of anyone who is not in prison, including if they are on probation and parole.

Still, Iowa drew special attention because of its exceptionally punitive statutes.

Previously, all Iowans with felony convictions had to petition for individual restoration from the governor. “That creates the potential for uneven justice,” Reynolds said Wednesday. Moving forward, only those convicted of the crimes excluded in the executive order — homicide, manslaughter, and sexual crimes — will be required to petition for their rights to be restored. 

The executive order notably does not require people with felony convictions to pay off their restitution before they can vote. 

A bill introduced by the Senate GOP last year would have required that people pay off those sometimes massive bills before regaining their rights. Rick Sattler, an Iowa resident who was ordered to pay $150,000 in restitution for a vehicular homicide, told The Appeal at the time that he would never be able to pay that off, meaning that even under that bill, he would effectively be disenfranchised for life.

In 2019, Florida Republicans adopted such requirements that voters pay off all fines and fees associated with their sentence before they can vote. This significantly shrunk the impact of Amendment 4, a constitutional amendment approved by Florida voters in 2018 that automatically restored voting rights to most people convicted of felonies. That law has been the subject of intense legal battles, and a federal appeals court will hear arguments over its constitutionality on Aug. 18, the same day as the state primary. 

In signing the executive order, Reynolds noted that it is not a permanent solution, as a future governor could also change the state’s policy “with the stroke of a pen,” she said. To make the fix permanent, the state House and Senate would have to pass legislation to start the process toward amending the state constitution.

Reynolds’s predecessor, Republican Terry Branstad, did just that in 2011, when he rescinded Democratic Governor Tom Vilsack’s 2005 executive order restoring voting rights to roughly 80,000 Iowans. Advocates have urged Reynolds to reinstate Vilsack’s order for years.

Her order came just 3 months before the November presidential election and more than three years after Reynolds took office, leaving little time for advocates to reach out to newly-enfranchised voters, especially given the pandemic circumstances. 

Just last week, Iowa’s county auditors called on Reynolds to act, arguing that the election is approaching and they would need time to put policies and procedures in place to give people with felony convictions the right to vote.

The post Iowa Governor Expands Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.