Iowa Voters

Last week a story surfaced that seven Iowa counties supposedly had more registered voters than adult citizens. The story was advanced by a devious blogger and became state-wide news. Let’s take a look at his devious ways.

1. He pretended to be more than one person, calling himself a “law center” when in fact he is a lawyer-blogger whose blog is called ElectionLawCenter.com. This deviation from the facts managed to fool Iowa Secretary of State candidate Matt Schultz who yesterday told a radio audience the blogger was a non-partisan watchdog group.

2. His letter to Iowa’s Secretary of State Michael Mauro would find its way onto the website of Mauro’s opponent Schultz, but he never called the Secretary to investigate before he threatened to sue, according to Mauro’s election director Sarah Reisetter.

3. He used the Republican Noise Machine to push the story. It was picked up by the Washington Times, Michelle Malkin, TheIowaRepublican.com and and he put it on his other blog at pajamas media. Eventually Iowa media took the bait. Bingo!

4. His accusatory letter had no numbers included so the public could not evaluate his threat. This allowed Matt Schultz to pimp the story while carefully noting that he could not know if it was actually worrisome or even true.

5. When confronted with real numbers by this post, he alleged that some of the adults should not count because they may be non-citizens. He avoided admitting that the rural county in question is only .2% foreign born. That’s two people for every thousand. And no doubt some (all?) of them eventually became citizens.

6. Finally he admitted he has no ability to sue since he doesn’t live in any of the states he threatened. Someone else will have to use his non-numbers to buttress their own court case. Fat chance in Iowa.

The blogger (J. Christian Adams) never discussed the real reasons that there might be more voters on the list than there are on the census website. Let us count the reasons:

A: The voter rolls are names of certain people. The census figures are estimates of county totals. The census bureau can detect a falling population, but it cannot know which people have left town. The county cannot remove names until it knows which names to drop.

B: My college son lives in Ames, according to the census. He votes here, according to the voter rolls. Same for some soldiers on a military base. This confuses Schultz and Adams. Pretty ironic given that Schultz’s brother is in college in another state. Will he vote for Matt? If so, he will have become part of this phenomenon.

C: When stable rural counties have a high rate of voter registration, there is no wiggle room for declining population. People move away and leave no forwarding address. They don’t register to vote elsewhere until a provocative election comes around again. Their names are still on the voting list, but the census believes that some of them are no longer here.

It is devious and disreputable to compare a list of particular people to an estimate of population. There are laws that protect your voter registration until you change it yourself. Adams and Schultz mock those laws in pursuit of a new law that would stop you from voting if your driver’s license has expired.

Their gambit was successful. They delivered propaganda in the form of news. They will convince many people who barely follow the story. Then they will claim public opinion favors their goals even though no facts support their case.

Candidate Matt Schultz went on the radio yesterday to push his “number one issue”—requiring photo identification of all voters. In the process he showed how little he knows about election laws and covered up his discomfort by laughing his way through the ten minute interview.

Schultz portrayed the accusatory electionlawcenter.com as a “non-partisan group.” In fact it is a blog run by a highly partisan attorney. If you try to find the so-called center with a Google search, all you can find is the blog. Schultz should know this by now.

Then he acknowledged that no actual numbers were provided in the letter threatening to sue Iowa for incorrect numbers. He admitted that the charges are unproven. Nevertheless he still features the letter at his website and he wants to use the story to push his agenda. That is indeed the real purpose of the story in the first place–to scare us into erecting barriers to voting.

Schultz joked about dead people voting or about people moving here from Chicago to impersonate dead Iowans at the polls. Since this canard is not grounded in any facts, he offered no facts to back it up. If he ever checked the voting rolls for dead Iowans, he could see that their names are removed as part of routine list maintenance. If he had paid attention last week to Secretary Mauro’s rebuttal, Schultz would even know the number of deceased removed in each county.

He further alleged that poll workers are powerless to stop an unfamiliar voter from impersonating the dead. He’s never actually read the law: Iowa Code 49.77 (3)

A precinct election official may require of the voter
unknown to the official, identification in the form prescribed by the state commissioner by rule. If identification is established to the satisfaction of the precinct election officials, the person may then be allowed to vote.

In a few minutes on the radio Schultz and his interviewer managed to mention aliens, Arizona, cheating, felons, dead voters, and Chicago politics while pretending to be average citizens bewildered by the ways of election administration. I’d say that makes him a poor candidate for Secretary of State.

Still, you got to hand it to him. When you are not constrained by any facts, a few minutes on statewide radio is all you need to plant doubts in the minds of the public. He was wildly successful at that.

A Republican partisan is trying to make Iowa look bad. He is threatening to sue us over our voter registration rolls.

It’s not news when a blogger threatens to sue a state official, so he calls his blog “Election Law Center.” This isn’t your average blogger, since he is a lawyer, but he’s still just a partisan hack trying to gin up fears of dead people voting or of aliens behind the curtain canceling out your vote.

Naturally this attack is featured on the website of the Republican candidate for Secretary of State Matt Schultz. What else has he got to offer us? Probably nothing. Last spring he was the only one of the several Republicans running for this nomination who did not answer questions I sent about the auditing of voting machine results.

Now he aligns with that blogger who says several Iowa counties have listed more voters than there are adults in the county. He can’t know how many people live there since census figures are nearly ten years old. Other figures on population do exist, but Republicans always say they are not reliable. They oppose using those figures in lieu of the census when drawing up legislative districts. Since those figures can make it look like there are phantom voters, then it’s OK to use the data.

How could there possibly be more voters than citizens? For one thing, there are always people like the 2006 Republican candidate for Secretary of State, Mary Ann Hanusa. She lived in the Washington, D.C. area for years while voting in Iowa elections. I scolded her at the time. I wonder if she has an opinion on this lawsuit threat. She is running for the Iowa House this year.

Iowa counties send their voting lists to a private vendor who checks with the post office for address changes. If a voter has moved, she may wind up on the list of inactive voters. Inactive voters must prove their residence if they actually show up to vote.

In the letter threatening a lawsuit no distinction is made between active voters and inactive voters. The blogger, J. Christian Adams, merely says seven counties “have more registered voters than citizens of voting age.”

Let’s look at one of them: Adams County, the state’s smallest county and not named after the blogger. It’s 2000 census showed 4482 residents with 76.1% of them old enough to vote. That’s 3410 citizens old enough to vote. Last month the voting rolls showed 3260 voters of which 106 were inactive and probably living in Omaha or Kansas City. So far the county looks clean.

But this Census Bureau site says the county had a 2009 population of only 3930 with 78.1% of them old enough to vote. That means 3069 potential voters. Bingo! Adams claims 3260 (3154 active) voters! Obviously some of them are getting set to vote from the grave!

Perhaps the partisan doesn’t know that in Iowa it’s not so much that voters die off. It’s that children move away. The population shrinks faster than the voting rolls.

Since the blogger didn’t use any actual numbers in his certified letter threatening Mauro, we may never know the basis for his claim. Mauro has already denied Adams County has the alleged problem. I left a comment at the blogger’s website and have written the Republican candidate for Secretary of State who has featured this story on his website. I also wrote to all seven counties (Adams, Audubon, Chickasaw, Fremont, Jefferson, Kossuth, and Lyon) to get their side of the story. I’ll let you know what they say.