Iowa Publishes Misleading Info To Drum Up Support For Voting Restrictions
Source: Talking Points Memo
By ALICE OLLSTEIN Published APRIL 10, 2017, 9:52 AM EDT
Iowa's Republican secretary of state issued several misleading and inaccurate reports to the press regarding the frequency of voter fraud, according to e-mails from his own staff obtained by the Huffington Post and published this weekend.
In a bid to justify a host of voting restrictions he has proposed, Republican Paul Pate, the state's top election official, told local reporters that 41 felons had cast ballots in the 2016 election and that more than 200 election day voter registrations had "bounced back" as invalid.
Yet deputy secretary of state for elections Carol Olson argued in an internal e-mail that neither of those findings are evidence of voter fraud, as Pate claimed. The voters with criminal records, she said, may have been urged by a poll worker to cast a provisional ballot—which would later be reviewed and tossed out as ineligible if indeed they were barred from voting. And the 200 invalid same-day registrations that bounced back, Olson added, could be attributed to human error.
"The vast majority of these ‘bounce-backs’ are sloppy addresses from voters in too much of a hurry when they register at the polls," she wrote. "That’s a real reason to discourage EDR and a real reason to have pollbooks, but it’s not an indicator of illegal activity.”
Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/iowa-voter-id-fraud
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I once thought of Iowa as a moderate, sensible state. But it seems to be moving headlong in the same bizarre and tragic direction as another once-great state (now destroyed by Scott Walker and his allies), Wisconsin.
