Floyd County petition drive drives confusion

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Uncertainty over the proper form for petitions led to a verbal standoff this week at the Floyd County courthouse, with a county deputy being called to the scene and the conversation growing heated.

The two parties involved disagree on what was eventually decided, and a discussion — and possible decision — on the matter may come next Tuesday at the county Board of Supervisors meeting.

A group representing the effort to force a special election in the method of electing county supervisors presented their petition at the County Auditor’s Office Tuesday afternoon, June 1, the deadline for such actions. But the county auditor wasn’t sure the petitions were proper.

Gordon Boge, president of the Coalition for Better County Government, said the petitions held 1,124 signatures, many more than the 809 that were required, on 97 pages.

But Auditor Gloria Carr said she found some of the pages of signatures did not have the petition language at the top of the page.

“My response was, petitions for elections have to have that header on every signature page,” Carr told the Press. “And that’s when things started going sideways.”

Boge said, “She said you can’t guarantee that the people who signed the second page read the front page.”

Carr said she called the Iowa Secretary of State’s office and talked with Wesley Hicok, administration & elections executive officer, and asked him if she should count those pages.

“His response was, the standard for petitions should be the same for elections as for nomination papers, and so that’s what I went by,” Carr said, although she added that in another conversation with Hicok the next day he said it was ultimately the county’s decision.

She told Hicok that some of the members of the group — which in addition to Boge were Scott Andrews, Merlyn Schweizer and Dennis Keifer — said they wanted the petitions back and they would staple or tape the pages together.

She said she was advised to mark each page that didn’t have a header so she could tell — if the group took them back and turned them in again — if they had been manipulated.

She started marking each of those pages with a yellow highlighter and at that point Boge asked for the petitions back and accused Carr of defacing a public document.

As the conversation grew more heated, Carr called the Sheriff’s Office in the courthouse and asked for a deputy to come down.

A deputy arrived, but just monitored the situation and took no action.

At some point a member of the petitioning group called the attorney who had helped them craft the petition, Michael Byrne of Mason City, and Byrne said the Iowa Code requirements Carr was citing had to do with nominating candidates for election and was not part of the code that covered the petition for supervisor representation.

Carr said her response was that she doesn’t answer to Byrne, but to the county.

Carr said the group took the petitions back into the hall and found pages that had the petition language at the top with about 650 signatures, so they were about 150 short if they could count only those pages.

“I offered to them if they want to make sure that they have valid signatures they could go, they have until 4:30, they can get their 150-some signatures they needed to come up with 809 that are required,” she said.

“They chose not to take the petitions back and get any additional signatures,” she said.

Boge said it is his understanding that when Carr later took back the petitions it signified she had accepted them and it’s just a formality now to call for the special election.

“It’s a done deal in my book,” Boge said. “The law’s the law. It’s just too bad we had to go through all this. Gloria Carr had wrong information, when she was bound and determined that she took a highlighter pen and went through all of my second pages, which defaced an official document.

“She called the sheriff on us because I told her I wanted my signatures back. She wouldn’t give them back to me. I said you’re defacing those,” Boge said.

He said the county attorney and his attorney had had a discussion, “and they were submitted properly and everything is good.”

Carr said she doesn’t see the matter as settled, and it will likely be on the Board of Supervisors agenda at the regular Tuesday afternoon meeting. Assistant County Attorney Randall Tilton will be at that meeting, and she expects a decision will be made then, she said.

She said it’s not her decision to make whether the petitions are valid, unless she’s told it’s her decision.

As county auditor, Carr is also the county’s commissioner of elections, and she said in her 16 years experience all petitions dealing with elections have had the requirement to have the petition language on every page.

For example, she said, the recent petition for a vote to change the way the county hospital is governed was required to follow that format.

Carr allowed that the state codes in the matter are drafted “clumsily.” For example, the code says the petitions have to be turned in to the county commissioner of elections, but then says the supervisors will accept them and call for a special election. There are also references back and forth between other parts of the state code, including to the part dealing with elections.

The petitioning group is trying to force a special election to be held this summer to ask voters to consider changing the way county supervisors are elected.

Currently, the three supervisors all run at-large, meaning each of them represents the entire county, and all the voters in the county can vote for every seat that’s up for election.

Boge’s group would like to have the county divided into districts, so that the supervisor from each district has to live in that district.

There are three options for supervisor representation under the Iowa code. The first is the at-large format currently used in Floyd County.

The second option is to divide the county into districts by population and for every voter to vote for every district. Candidates would still have to run for the district they live in, but everyone in the county could help decide the election results for every district.

The third option — the one that the petitioning group favors — is that only voters who live in a specific district can vote for the supervisor for that district.

A petition to call for a special election to decide how supervisors are elected must be filed by June first of an odd-numbered year. The special election would then be held on the first Tuesday in August, which this year would be Aug. 3.

All three options would be on the ballot and the one that gets the most votes would take effect at the next general election, a year and a half later, or in this case, the general election in November 2022.