Paul Pate
Five statewide elected officials have certified last week’s special election in the Cedar Falls area and Senator-elect Eric Giddens will be sworn into office this afternoon.
Nearly 46 percent of the votes in Giddens’ were cast early with an absentee ballot. About 29.6 percent of eligible voters in Senate District 30 participated. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate is praising the Black Hawk County Auditor and his staff for how they dealt with moving a precinct voting site last Tuesday because of flooding.
“Those are never an easy thing to do, but they did it in such a fashion to not cause any disenfranchisement or confusion,” Pate says. “They put placards on the street closure signs because of the way you couldn’t get to the polling site and worked with the local media to make sure messaging was put out that that site got moved for that day’s election.”
Pate’s staff has done an audit of the results and confirmed Giddens won last week’s election by 15 points. Giddens, a Democrat, is replacing Democrat Jeff Danielson who resigned from the Iowa Senate last month to take a job with the American Wind Energy Association.