Registered voters in Iowa can now request absentee ballots for the November general election from their county auditor’s office. The first day auditors can mail the ballots to voters who have requested them will be Oct. 16, the same day early in-person voting begins.
Printable absentee ballot request forms are available on the Iowa Secretary of State’s site. In addition to name and address, the person requesting the ballot must also provide their “voter verification number,” which can be either their driver’s license number, non-operator’s ID number or the four-digit pin number on their Iowa voter ID card.
Signed and completed forms must be returned to the county auditor’s office, either in person or via the mail. The forms must be received by the auditor no later than 5 p.m. on Monday Oct. 21 to be considered valid.
All ballot requests must be received by the auditor’s office in the county where the voter lives by Oct. 21 to be considered valid. The Iowa Secretary of State’s Office has an online look-up tool for anyone needing the address of their county auditor’s office.
This will be the first presidential election since Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a 2021 bill imposing new restrictions on voting. That bill, SF 413, moved through the Iowa House and Senate with unusual speed. The 37-page bill received final approval just eight days after it was first introduced. Only Republicans voted in favor of SF 413, while all the Democrats in both chambers opposed it.
The changes to election law in SF 413 included a prohibition on county auditors sending an absentee ballot request form to any voter unless the voter requests one using the written form created by the Iowa Secretary of State’s office. It also cut 50 days off the time period during which a voter can request an absentee ballot, reducing it from 120 days to 70 days. The opportunity to vote early was also cut, going from 29 days to 20 days, making Iowa’s early voting period one of the shortest in the country.
Before 2017, Iowa had a 40 day-long early voting period. But Republicans, who took control of both chambers of the legislature that year, pushed through a bill that reduced early voting to 29 days on a series of party-line votes. That same bill imposed the 120-day period for requesting an absentee ballot. Prior to that, a voter could request an absentee ballot even several months before an election.
The bill also curtailed local control of elections. A county auditor’s office is now limited to one drop box for voters returning absentee ballots in person, and SF 413 specifies where that box must be located. County auditors were also stripped of the authority to establish satellite locations for early voting according to their best judgment. Instead, satellite locations can only be established in response to a petition signed by 100 voters, and the petition must specify the location where the satellite will be placed.
This year, voters will have until Thursday, Sept. 19, to submit a petition to create a satellite voting location. (The Johnson County Auditor’s site already lists satellite early voting locations at the Coralville Public Library, Iowa Memorial Union, Iowa City Public Library and North Liberty Community Library.)
Other restrictions on voting in SF 413 cut the time for voting on Election Day by an hour, making the polling places close at 8 p.m. instead of 9 p.m. Absentee ballots must be received by the county auditor’s office by the time the polls close on Election Day in order to be considered valid. Previously, as long as a mailed-in absentee ballot was postmarked by Election Day and received in the auditor’s office by the Monday following the election it could be counted.
SF 413 also made it illegal for anyone other than a member of a voter’s immediate family, someone living as part of the voter’s household or specified election officials to return someone else’s absentee ballot.
Iowa was one of 19 Republican-led states that enacted new restrictions on voting in 2021, the Brennan Center for Justice reported in December of that year. “[S]tate legislatures enacted far more restrictive voting laws in 2021 than in any year since the Brennan Center began tracking voting legislation in 2011,” the nonpartisan law and public policy nonprofit said.
“These bills are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election,“ according to the Brennan Center.
None of the Republican lawmakers in the Iowa House and Senate who spoke in favor of the SF 413 claimed that voter fraud was happening in Iowa, but some repeated lies about the 2020 election told by former President Trump, citing debunked allegations of widespread voter fraud in states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia. State and federal courts had already rejected those allegations as baseless.
In a written statement issued after she signed SF 413, Reynolds said changes to election law made by the bill were necessary to “promote more transparency and accountability, giving Iowans even greater confidence to cast their ballot.”
