Sec Pate explains voter ID ‘soft rollout’ at Newton roundtable

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate continued his statewide information push on Iowa’s new voter ID law Tuesday in a roundtable discussion with voters, poll workers and county officials in Newton.

About 20 people came to the Jasper County Community Center for the 2 p.m. roundtable hoping to gain a better understanding of what identification is now needed to vote in Iowa.

In 2018, registered voters will not be required to show an ID to vote. Poll workers will ask for identification but if the voter cannot present it, they will have the option of signing an “honesty pledge” and given a provisional ballot. Pate told the poll workers and election officials present Tuesday, no voter should be turned away.

“That is why I was so insistent on the soft roll out because I felt we needed to give the voters a chance to go through this,” Pate said. “Every time you vote, that experience reinforces it, and I can’t emphasize enough the importance of poll workers.”

By 2019, the law signed by former Gov. Terry Branstad in 2017 will take full affect.

Forms of ID accepted at the polls are:

• Current Iowa driver’s license

• State-issued voter ID card

• Government-issued passport

• Tribal ID card

• U.S. Military or veterans ID card

A sample graphic of the various types of accepted ID will be at every Iowa polling place. Pate brought the poster board Tuesday as a visual aid.

“The last straw is the provisional ballot. Nobody gets turned away. That’s crucial,” Pate said. “I have put a little more on the shoulders of poll workers because I didn’t want to put it on the voters. That’s what the soft roll out is about.”

Pate said his office has also been working with Iowa’s colleges and universities, so by next year campus ID cards will also have the required information necessary for students to show or scan that barcode at the polls.

In Iowa, 92 of the state’s 99 counties are using the E-polling system which allows poll workers to simply scan the barcode on an approved ID to verify a voter’s identity.

As promised, Tuesday’s roundtable largely stuck to policy and implementation of the law and mostly avoided politics. There were, however, elected officials in the audience that did not completely shy away from a challenge.

State Rep. Wes Breckenridge, D-Newton, sat in the front row and stressed both his concern for the reduced number of early voting days in the law, down from 40 to 29, and the need for voter education on the law in multiple mediums — newspapers, radio, TV, email and direct mailing. He worries one or more demographics could be left out if the information campaign was not robust.

“I think it’s great we’re doing that education, but we need to tweak that education to each era of voters,” Breckenridge said. “My father doesn’t have the internet or a computer. So as long as getting on TV, radio, mailing. ... That’s my fear because some of the people we are referring to don’t have that technology.”

Pate said the secretary of state’s office has been using all tools at its disposal, but urged questions on the voter ID cards mailed to registered voters to go to their county auditor’s office. Breckenridge worries if people are not expecting the cards, they will get thrown out with the junk mail.

Pate, a Republican, is facing his own re-election campaign in 2018 in a race against Democrat Deidre DeJear. Voter ID laws have come under scrutiny nationally by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, calling the rules discriminatory against low income and minority voters. Proponents say the laws are a defense against voter fraud.

In an interview following Tuesday’s event, Pate defended the Election Integrity Act, the law’s official title, stating both its intent and substance is different than other voter ID laws recently passed in states like Wisconsin and Texas. Iowa’s law does not require a photo ID and Pate argued until the law passed, there was no measure in place to assess possible voter fraud in the state.

“(The law) wasn’t just about voter fraud. It was about the perception for voters,” Pate said. “... We don’t know for a fact (there’s been no voter fraud), because we never had a monitoring system to tell our county attorneys, to tell our office of voter registration issues or things along those lines.”

Jane Odland is a Newton voter and president of the League of Women Voters of Jasper County. She told the Newton Daily News on Tuesday she knows several voters, not in favor of the law, who plan to keep their IDs in the car and not present it at the polls until they absolutely have to as a form of “soft protest.”

“I think that it’s a solution in search of a problem,” Odland said. “I think that there are not that many instances of people who vote who weren’t eligible. I think there will be times where people are not sure if they have the right identification to vote. It might discourage people.”

Pate led Tuesday’s roundtable with discussions on cyber-security and foreign governments and actors meddling in U.S. and Iowa elections. The secretary noted the decentralized, state-by-state election system in the U.S. makes it difficult for outside entities to hack the actual vote tallies, and in Iowa physical ballots create a paper trail to ensure the count is accurate.

“It makes it tough for someone in Moscow to mess with our election. ... No one has hacked our election system in this state,” Pate said. “You election workers know, no one is walking in here and misleading you. You know the criteria.”

The topic of election meddling has become central at the state and county auditor’s level after consensus from the U.S. intelligence community emerged that the Russian government had a comprehensive network attempting to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Pate said Tuesday the most prevalent election meddling is done on social media through propaganda campaigns and disinformation campaigns.

Contact Mike Mendenhall at 641-792-3121 ext. 6530 mmendenhall@newtondailynews.com