The Iowa Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling preventing county auditors from filling out information on absentee ballot requests without contacting the applicant.
“On the present record, we are not persuaded the statute imposes a significant burden on absentee voters,” the court wrote in its 4-3 decision on Wednesday. “Indeed, the plaintiffs offer no evidence that the challenged statute will in fact deny any Iowan the right to vote by absentee ballot.”
Until this summer, auditors were allowed to fill in any missing information that could be obtained from voter registration databases. County officials told the Associated Press that applicants routinely fail to fill out driver’s license numbers or voter PINs, noting few voters even know what their PIN is.
However, in June, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a bill that broadly limited absentee ballot requests and forbade auditors from filling out parts of the application without contacting the voter within 24 hours of processing the ballot.
Under the court ruling, auditors must reach out to voters by phone, email, or mail before they fill in any missing information. As of September, tens of thousands of absentee applications have already been invalidated in just three Iowa counties, according to the Des Moines Register.
“The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly warned that courts ‘should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election,'” the majority wrote. “On this record, we again decline on the eve of this election to invalidate the legislature’s statute providing additional election safeguards.”
The dissenting judges argued that the ruling “dismisses the record evidence not only about the pandemic and its effects on county auditors’ ability to keep up with record-breaking requests for absentee ballots — requests made at the urging of the defendant that voting by mail is the safest way to vote — it also dismisses the record evidence about the significant number of ballot requests county auditors will receive with missing or incorrect information.”
They argued the case is not about voters but rather “the back-end process of timely correcting the errors that clearly happen on a fairly large scale.”
The deadline to request an absentee ballot in Iowa is Saturday at 5 p.m.
