A Republican congressman charges that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chet Culver has broken state law by posting voting materials in other languages on the Secretary of State’s website.
Culver is Iowa’s current Secretary of State and has offered voter registration and absentee ballot applications in Spanish, Bosnian, Laotian and Vietnamese. Congressman Steve King, a Republican from Kiron, says that’s a violation of the state law which declared that English is Iowa’s official language. “That is a direct and open violation of Iowa law and I’ve just asked the Secretary of State to take the website down and replace it with a website that would be consistent with Iowa law,” King says.
King served in the state legislature and was a co-author of the 2002 “official English” law. “When it says…in current Iowa law, as signed by Governor Vilsack, that official documents and publications shall be in English, then they should be in English,” King says.
Iowa’s Attorney General issued a statement late Thursday, saying the “plain language” of the Iowa law permits the Secretary of State to “provide voter forms in languages in addition to English.”
Taylor West, a spokeswoman for the Culver campaign, calls King’s complaints a “desperate attempt” to try to save the campaign of his fellow Republican congressman, Jim Nussle, the GOP candidate for governor.