For Brad Anderson, the Democratic candidate for Iowa’s secretary of state, it’s not about getting stuck in the mud of the office’s partisan politics.
For things to get accomplished, there needs to a bipartisan effort.
“It’s really about who has the best ideas for this office moving forward, and I believe my ideas are the right approach,” Anderson said during an interview with the Osceola Sentinel-Tribune.
Anderson has worked in elections across the state for more than a dozen years, working directly for candidates and local ballot initiatives.
In 2010, he worked on the Iowa’s Water and Land Legacy Constitutional amendment, which aimed to clean up the state’s water and protect its soil. He said it was a bipartisan group effort of sportsman, conservationists, Republicans, Democrats and farmers, and it passed with 63 percent of the vote.
During the 2012 election cycle, Anderson was President Barack Obama’s Iowa state director.
Beyond the election season, Anderson and his wife Lisa own a small speech therapy business in Des Moines.
“I have a unique experience in the sense that I understand the election side of the office, but I also understand the business side and some of the struggles that small business owners face with trying to their paperwork at the secretary of state’s office,” he said.
Frustration
It was in 2012 when Anderson grew frustrated with seeing what was happening in Iowa’s secretary of state’s office. He said this is in terms of wasting of taxpayer dollars while trying to prove there was a huge wave cheating at the polls in Iowa that didn’t exist.
Anderson was referencing Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz’s two-year investigation and cost of effort into finding potential voter fraud across the state.
“I’ve proposed a different approach and a better approach,” Anderson said. “One that says let’s make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat, and modernize the business filing services in the office to make it easier for small businesses to file their paperwork.”
Anderson said a system of easy and effective voting is a bipartisan tradition in Iowa, including 40 days of early voting, no-fault absentee voting with not needing a reason to vote absentee, voting early at an auditor’s office and satellite polling locations and registering to vote on election day for a period 14 hours.
“A lot of these laws have been signed into law by Terry Branstad, who’s a Republican,” he said. “So, we’ve had bipartisan agreements in the past of making it as easy as possible, and that’s really what we need to return to.”
Electronic poll book
One of Anderson’s main proposals is expanding the electronic poll book to all of Iowa’s 99 counties.
When voters go to the polls on election day, they would check in electronically and the poll worker would let them know whether or not they are at the correct polling location and eligible to vote. An example of ineligibility is a person who is on the felon voting registry.
“What this would do is it would prevent election misconduct, whether intentional or not, before it happens, rather than having expensive investigations after the fact,” Anderson said.
The electronic poll book is currently being used in 68 counties across the state.
“There’s nothing better that we could do to strengthen the integrity of our elections than expanding the use of the electronic poll book,” he said.