(Radio Iowa) – State officials are urging Iowans to be wary of scams that INCORRECTLY claim you can cast your vote online or by phone. Iowa Department of Public Safety Commissioner Stephan Bayens says his agency started investigating a Mahaska County case in September. “Phone calls were being made and attempting to gain either personal information or to leave a false impression that you could vote via the telephone,” Bayens says. “Obviously once that information gets passed up through the Mahaska County Sheriff’s office, it came into the Department of Public Safety and our FBI partners as well.”

As with most phone scams, Bayens says it’s been hard to track down the guilty party on the other end of the line. “Given current digital technology…they can bounce those numbers from across the United States or across the world and so we continue to kind of chase those breadcrumbs,” Bayens says. “In this particular instance, it does not appear that those calls generated in the state Iowa, but were from outside of Iowa.”

Election officials are reminding Iowans that every vote in Iowa is cast by paper ballot, either on Election Day or with an absentee ballot during the early voting period.