Stories

ANALYSIS: With a handful of Iowa legislative races within double digits or even single digits, and three U.S. Senate races yet to be decided, the word “recount” is buzzing in the air.

While a recount may give a losing candidate emotional satisfaction and a sense of closure, the vote shifts tend to be very, very small.

ANALYSIS:

If John McCain is going to win Iowa, it will likely happen Monday.

And if Barack Obama is going to win Iowa, it’s already happened. Depending on how you look at it, it happened in the past six weeks, or it happened starting two years ago.

Record early voting and Election Day voter registration could increase the impact of ballot challenges on Iowa’s seven electoral votes.

With a week to go until Election Day, Democrats continue to hold a nearly 2-1 edge in absentee voting in Iowa and the number of registered voters in the Hawkeye state has topped 2 million.

A bill that would count Iowa’s absentee ballots by precinct, rather than across whole counties, has been amended and reintroduced in the Iowa House.

The new version of the bill, House File 2367, specifies that it would apply only to partisan primary and general elections, and would exclude precincts with fewer than ten absentee voters in [...]

The process of getting an absentee ballot may get slightly less bureaucratic this fall, if a bill that passed the Senate overwhelmingly Monday makes its way past the House and Governor Culver.

Senate File 2089 by Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, would roll back a 2004 change that required auditors to accept absentee requests only if they [...]

The second-biggest statistical secret in Iowa politics could be out in the open if a Linn County Republican’s bill passes the Legislature.

The biggest secret, of course, is the raw vote total from the Democratic caucuses.  That’s still hush-hush.  But the second-biggest mystery is how the absentee votes break out by precinct.  Current Iowa law, drafted [...]

A new organization supporting Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential bid challenges Californians to “BEAT IOWA.”  That’s the title of today’s blog post on the new organization Vote Hope’s web site.  “For too many years,” the post begins, “those of us who live outside of small states like Iowa and New Hampshire have not had much of [...]