Coming from the “No We Did Not Make This Up” file, Iowa’s Secretary of State Matt Schultz is seeking emergency rules that would allow him to purge thousands of voters from Iowa’s voter registration list.
And the Secretary of State is using funds from the Help America Vote Act to pay for the staff to do the purge.
Democrats in Iowa’s legislature are rightly crying foul. State Senator Tom Coutney, who chairs Iowa’s Senate Government Oversight Committee, questioned the Secretary of State’s use of federal funding meant to help Americans vote for his high-profile voter purge campaign.
During an appearance before the Legislature’s Administrative Rules Review Committee, Schultz admitted that instead of using federal Help America Vote Act funding for its intended purposes (especially upgrading voting machines and training poll workers), he is using the funds on a controversial effort to purge Iowa’s voter rolls in the final 55 days of the 2012 campaign.
“The Help America Vote Act was passed 10 years ago to provide funding to all states to make voting easier and to increase access to polls,” said Senator Tom Courtney of Burlington. “It is stunning that Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz is instead using Iowa’s funds for an 11th hour attempt to purge Iowa’s voter rolls.”
“Secretary of State Schultz should immediately stop using Help America Vote Act funding for this misguided campaign that is only serving to scare qualified voters away from the polls.”
As Margaret Carlson pointed out this week, “There is a huge voting problem in the U.S., but it isn’t the one Republicans are spending many millions of dollars to correct. The issue is that not enough people vote.”
However, instead of advocating policies that improve access to our Democracy, Republicans in state legislatures are moving the opposite direction:
Carlson sums the problem up here:
The misplaced focus on voter ID also detracts from attention we should be paying to more common, and consequential, problems: pamphlets giving the wrong date to vote, missing ballot boxes, voting machines that don’t work. Republican groups such as True the Vote are working to sign up volunteers on Election Day to challenge voters as they show up -- a poll tax measured not in dollars but in intimidation.
Ensuring that Democrats control state legislatures is more important than ever. A Democratic majority in the state Senate was the only reason the Secretary of State was forced to publicly account for his actions, and this attempt to use funds that were designed to help voters instead to intimidate voters would have never garnered the urgent public attention it deserves.
Reposted from DLCC.org.
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10:10 AM PT: The ACLU of Iowa and the United Latin American Citizens have filed suit to stop the purge.