Joel Miller.

Linn County Auditor, Joel Miller, says he is considering a run for Iowa Secretary of State.

Miller is a Democrat and says he is collecting signatures for a possible run against incumbent Republican Paul Pate. Miller talked about a potential run while in Sioux City last week for a conference of county auditors. “I’m exploring, I’m not committed because I want to gather data and I don’t have a lot of data and information from western Iowa. I’ve been in eastern Iowa pretty much my whole life — that’s where I was born and raised — and I’ve held the office of Linn County Auditor for 14 plus years.”

Miller says he was disappointed by the election law bill passed by the legislature controlled by Republicans after record voting numbers in the primary and presidential elections. “The legislature decided to drop a 40-page election bill with lots of changes — primarily targeted at vote by mail, but also in-person early voting — with very little impact to people who vote on election day,” Miller says. “So it appears that the legislature majority Republican wanted to pick who they wanted to vote, versus the voters picking the legislators.”

Miller says the changes make it more inconvenient for some people to cast their votes. He says he believes the job of Secretary of State is to promote democracy. “The other part of that is to oppose anything that is anti-democratic,” Millers says, “and this election bill in my view is anti-democratic.”

Miller says his goal is to have every Iowan involved in our elections. Miller was one of the county auditors in Iowa sued by the Trump Administration for sending out absentee ballot request forms that had voter information on them before the last election. The judge sided with the administration and ruled absentee ballots sent out by Miller and other auditors were invalid.

(By Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)