(Radio Iowa) – Iowa’s top election official says there’s a team of state and federal officials working to ensure the safety of Iowa voters, poll workers and ballots in today’s (Tuesday’s) Primary. “We are dedicated to protecting the integrity of our elections and the sanctity of your vote,” Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate said.

Secretary of State Paul Pate. (RI photo)

Pate held a news conference Monday evening at the Iowa National Guard headquarters to discuss election security, emphasizing that Iowans use paper ballots and tabulating machines are not connected to the Internet. But Pate said he often gets reports of misinformation — some of it malicious — about Iowa’s elections.

The elections security team. (RI photo)

“With social media the way it is, it’s very easy for people to put information out there that can be misleading or tampering in some ways with an election, so we have be cognizant of it,” Pate said. “We have to keep people informed of the facts and do our very best.” Kim Wyman of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency said misinformation online is often from some of the countries that are engaged in cyber attacks on U.S. targets. “Places like Russia and Iran and China is we’ve seen them use mis-, dis- and mal-information campaigns to spread information that is not true to undermine not only confidence in our election system,” she said, “but to sow discord between Americans and to pit Americans against each other.”

Kim Wyman. (RI photo)

Iowa Public Safety Commissioner Stephan Bayens said staff in his agency are operating an intelligence hub to monitor digital and physical threats from both foreign and domestic adversaries that are related to Iowa elections.

“Our duty and focus is to educate Iowans on efforts to spread disinformation through emails and social media as well as any physical threats to our polling places on election day,” Bayens said.

Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management director John Benson announced that his agency recently used federal Homeland Security funding to buy secure storage equipment for 21 county auditors. “This investment will enable county auditors to more securely store and use their election equipment,” Benson said.

This is the first election after redistricting of congressional and legislative districts. That means precinct voting sites will be different for many voters. Pate said voters may find that a person who has represented them before in the U.S. congress or the state legislature may no longer be on their ballot because of district boundary changes

(Radio Iowa) – Tens of thousands of Iowans have cast absentee ballots for today’s Primary Election. Secretary of State Paul Pate has the latest numbers. “We’re about 65,000 early voting. That is above 2018 numbers, so that, to me, is a good indicator that people are paying attention,” Pate told Radio Iowa. “I don’t know if it’ll be as high as the past presidential cycle, but for a non-presidential election year, I think it’s pretty good.”

Iowa set an all-time primary election participation record of nearly half a million voters in 2020 — during the pandemic when many voters opted to cast absentee ballots rather than vote in person. Pate isn’t making predictions about turnout for this year’s Democratic and Republican Primary Elections. “Democrats and Republicans both have primaries in the U.S. Senate race. We have quite a few legislative primaries here and there across the state, so I think there’d be motivation to see a higher turnout, but my crystal ball is not that clear enough
to give you a hard number,” Pate said.

Iowans voting in-person today should double-check their polling location, as some have changed. That’s because of the once-every-decade process that has redrawn the boundaries of legislative and congressional districts. “It’s why you hear us talking about having a voting plan, checking your voting site, checking the secretary of state’s website to know where you’re going or call your county auditor because we want to make sure you’re comfortable in knowing where you’re supposed to be doing that voting,” Pate said.

Republican lawmakers shortened the time period for requesting an absentee ballot and the Iowa Capital Dispatch is reporting 461 voters in four of Iowa’s largest counties missed the deadline. Pate said he doesn’t have any statewide data, but isn’t surprised by those numbers from Polk, Linn, Scott and Black Hawk Counties. “I did expect that we’d see some of that. It’s going to probably take another election cycle to get people used to this,” Pate said, adding that county auditors have systems in place to notify voters if they didn’t make the absentee ballot request deadline and those voters have been able to vote in person at the county auditor’s office — or they can vote in-person today at their local precinct, “so they won’t be shut out.”

Iowans who’ve filled out an absentee ballot, but didn’t get it delivered have two options today. They can surrender it at their local precinct and cast a new ballot at the polling place or they can take the absentee ballot to their local county auditor’s office. Absentee ballots must be delivered to the auditor’s office by 8 p.m. tonight, or the ballot will not be counted.

The Legislative Council voted last month to give Pate authority — in emergency situations like fires — to let county election officials move precinct locations. “It could be something as simple as a water pipe burst,” Pate says. “In another incident, they moved a site because there were some other activities going on that were putting a lot of traffic congestion at a polling site so that people couldn’t readily access it, so we just basically moved it to the other side of a building, but it’s a technical thing and we want to make sure we handle it properly because the last thing we want to do is confuse a voter about having them go to the wrong spot and then find we moved it, so we want to be very sensitive in how we handle that.”

The polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. A 2021 law change moved up poll closing time an hour.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office reports 37-year-old Corey Smith,from Elliott,was arrested at around 5-p.m. Monday, in the 200 block of Cherry Street, in Elliott. Smith was transported to the Montgomery County Jail and charged with Failure to Appear, on an original Possession of a Controlled Substance/Methamphetamine – 3^rd offense, charge. His cash-only bond was set at $5,000.

(Radio Iowa) – There are two statewide races in Tuesday’s Primary Election for Iowa’s U-S Senate seat. Three candidates are competing in the Democratic Primary. In the Republican Primary, Jim Carlin is challenging incumbent Chuck Grassley. Grassley is seeking an eighth term. Carlin is an attorney and a state senator from Sioux City. “I feel that the base of people that are going to align themselves with us is very energized,” Carlin said.

According to the most recent campaign filing, Carlin raised over half a million dollars for his campaign and had about 56-hundred left in mid-May.  “I’m very fortunate to have some very good staff around the state and they’ve done a really good job getting us in front of a lot of people,” Carlin says. “….I think the message of the preservation of freedom has really resonated with a lot of people.”

Carlin says too many politicians care more about power than about representing their constituents.