Iowa mail-ballot directive blocked

IOWA CITY, Iowa — A judge Monday blocked Iowa’s secretary of state from enforcing an order that barred counties from sending absentee ballot applications to voters with their personal information already filled in.

Judge Robert Hanson sided with Democratic Party groups, which contended that Secretary of State Paul Pate exceeded his authority when he told counties that absentee ballot request forms must be blank when mailed to voters.

Hanson ordered Pate to put enforcement of his directive on hold. Local elections officials said they were studying the ruling to determine the impact, including whether they could take steps to mail ballots to thousands of voters whose requests were previously invalidated based on Pate’s directive.

The ruling came the same day that early in-person voting began in Iowa and that counties began mailing hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots to requesters statewide.

A law passed in June by the Republican- controlled Legislature blocks county officials from using their databases to fill in any missing information on the forms, as they have done in the past. Instead, they must contact voters by email, phone and mail to get them to fill in the gaps — a lengthy process that would be expected to leave many requesters with incomplete forms and therefore no access to absentee ballots.

In July, Pate issued an emergency directive telling county officials that any absentee ballot request forms mailed to voters must be blank to ensure uniformity statewide.

But elections commissioners in Linn, Johnson and Woodbury counties defied the directive, worried about the impact of the new law and citing their own authority as elected officials. They sent forms to registered voters containing their names, dates of birth, addresses and voter identification numbers already filled in, saying they wanted to make voting by mail easy during the coronavirus pandemic.

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and Republican Party groups filed lawsuits against the three counties to invalidate the prefilled forms. Judges quickly ruled in favor of Trump in all three cases, saying the counties violated Pate’s directive that they must be blank.

Under injunctions issued in those cases, voters must fill out new blank forms in order to qualify for absentee ballots and counties cannot process any pre-filled forms that are returned.