A Des Moines couple with clipboards was across the street from the Iowa State Fair’s Grand Avenue entrance Sunday afternoon, collecting signatures on petitions. “Donald Trump would hurt our country in certain ways and Hillary Clinton hurts our country in other ways. I think we need a person of integrity who listens to both sides and isn’t going to be partisan and values those who are struggling.” Kate and Dylan Jones are part of a last-minute effort to get independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin’s name on Iowa’s General Election ballots.

“This whole two-party system is actually pretty antiquated, this idea that, ‘Oh, you have to vote for a Democrat or you have to vote for a Republican,'” Jones says. “We want people to know that you can actually vote for who you believe, that you’re still free in this country to do that, and the next three months, we just want to use our voice as much as we possibly can, because we don’t want to look back and say: ‘I wish I had done more.'”

Evan McMullin will qualify for the Iowa ballot if his supporters collect the signatures of at least 15-hundred registered Iowa voters. The signatures have to come from at least 10 counties and must be submitted to Iowa’s Secretary of State by this Friday. That’s why the crowd streaming into the State Fair was a prime target, since people come from across the state to attend. “I’ve been getting flooded by friends who say: ‘Hey, we are interested. We can’t make it to the fair today, but we want to come,'” Kate Jones says. The couple and others plan to be on the sidewalks outside the fairgrounds this week until they get the petition signatures they need.

Kate and Dylan attended the Iowa Republican Party’s Caucuses on February 1st and both supported Marco Rubio. They want to vote “for” someone in November, but neither can vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. “We would really like someone who is presidential,” Dylan Jones says. “We’ve been a little disappointed with how the Republican Party really has handled themselves throughout this whole election process, some of the things Donald Trump has said and a lot of the hate-filled rhetoric.”

The Jones’s say they want to “vote their conscience” and they’re worried about Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. “We need compassionate leaders and the ability to articulate that refugees are not ISIS. They are people who’ve gone through trauma and don’t have a lot of resources when they come here and we need to be their neighbors,” Kate Jones said.

Kate Jones is 33 years old and works as a graphic designer. Her husband is 30 and works as a landscape architect.

(Radio Iowa)