DES MOINES, Iowa — Secretary of State Paul Pate said voting is going well so far on Tuesday.
Voters say they only ran into a few issues.
One voter, who was actually a candidate for governor at the beginning of the race, was unable to vote because his name wasn’t in the registration log even though he had registered at the most recent caucus.
“So went to the polling place with my wife, and she was on the voter logs but I wasn’t. What that means is, since I wasn’t on the log, then I would have needed a current ID to do same-day registration. We just moved here, to this area, so my license still has old registration address so I could not vote,” said former gubernatorial candidate Brent Roske.
Roske said he planned to go back to his polling place after work with a utility bill and his ID so he can re-register and cast his ballot.
Poll workers said they haven’t had too many issues with the ‘soft rollout’ of the voter ID law, but did run into a couple of people who still didn’t have IDs. Those people were still able to vote by verifying their address and signing the log book next to their name.
Some eastern Iowa voters received texts from a campaign office telling them the location of their polling place, but for many of them it wasn’t the one to which they were assigned.
Secretary Pate is still investigating, but said they believe there was no malicious intent.
Polk County Auditor Jamie Fitzgerald said he’s received good reports from polling places and the poll workers were trained well to help voters with the changes.