Does Brad Anderson Understand the Iowa Secretary of State’s Job?

Brad Anderson, who is the Democratic challenger for the Iowa Secretary of State office, earlier this week attacked current Secretary of State Matt Schultz for focusing on voter ID and voter fraud.

Isn’t that his job?  Again it seems like he doesn’t understand the office he’s running for.  James Lynch reported for the Quad Cities Times:

Anderson attacked first-term Secretary of State Matt Schultz for wasting taxpayer money on his single-minded focus on voter fraud, including attempts to require voters to show a photo identification to vote.

Photo IDs disenfranchise at least 10 percent of voters, Anderson said at a fundraiser at New Bo Market. That’s despite a lack of support from county auditors who oversee elections because they see it as unnecessary and increasing red tape.

“We have a secretary of state who is being audited for wasting $280,000 of taxpayer money on a partisan investigation,” he said. “What’s worse, after years of investigations, after hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on these investigations, he has yet to convict a single voter of knowingly committing voter fraud.”

Schultz, he said, likes to talk about protecting and maintaining the integrity of elections.

“There’s no integrity in wasting taxpayer dollars,” Anderson said. “There’s no integrity in blocking eligible voters from voting.”

Anderson charged Schultz is blocking eligible voters by compiling a list of undocumented workers who have applied for an Iowa driver’s license and later registered to vote.

It ignores the fact those people may have become eligible to vote between the time they applied for the driver’s license and registered to vote.

Anderson seems to ignore the fact that Matt Schultz has been repeatedly blocked from accessing a federal database that would help keep an accurate list of residents who are ineligible to vote.  He is doing is due diligence to purge fraud, not immigrants who are eligible to vote.  The money that is being spent is for a contract with an investigator from the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation.  Prior to that nobody was tasked with investigating voter fraud.  So before if we reported it basically nothing was really done.  In terms of voter ID, that was what Matt Schultz ran on in 2010.  He’s trying to keep his campaign promise.  It’s also something that 71% of Iowans want,   Including 60% of Iowa Democrats.

If Brad Anderson wants to be the Secretary of State shouldn’t he understand that election integrity is a big part of the job?  The office isn’t to push liberal agendas which is the only thing he has experience at.  He said he will try to bring out more voters.  That’s something Matt Schultz has been actively doing as well.  He apparently can multi-task.

Photo credit: Jill Lehmann via Flickr (CC-By-ND 2.0)