Letter to the Editor: Successful counting of late-arriving absentee ballot in 2019 is good news, bad news

(The following Letter to the Editor has been submitted by Carol Birkland of Decorah):

"Could we call it 'Kayla's Law?'

This is a bad news, good news story (that the new absentee balloting system worked well this month: http://www.decorahnews.com/news-stories/2019/11/23834.html).  The bad news is that we will never actually know who won the 2018 election for the Iowa House District 55 seat.  Was it Mike Bergan or Kayla Koether who lost the election by 8 votes with 32 absentee ballots not being counted because they had not been post marked?  And, in a true Catch-22 scenario, the US Post Office does not postmark all mail.  Having no postmark, the ballots could not be counted.

The good news story is this:  Kayla took the battle to have those ballots counted all the way to the Iowa Supreme Court and lost there because, even though the court was sympathetic, it did not have jurisdiction in this matter and handed the problem to the Republican-controlled Iowa Legislature.  There was no doubt that those 32 ballots would never be counted because there was no way Republicans were going to risk losing the Bergan seat.

At a Decorah Town Hall not long after, I expressed my outrage that this had happened.  The Association of Iowa State Auditors, of which our country Auditor, Ben Steines, is a member, had been warning Iowa law makers for years that a situation – like Kayla's – was bound to happen. The warnings fell on deaf ears.  At that meeting, I told the legislators (Bergan, Breitbach and Osmundson) to go back to Des Moines and do their work!

More good news:  They did their work and after some foolish amendments offered by Republican Senators failed, a law was passed which allowed a US Postal Service bar code to be printed on absentee ballot return envelopes so, in the future, scanning that code would remove any doubt about when the ballot was mailed.

More good news:  Here in Decorah, Ben Steines was not required to use the new bar code envelopes in the 2019 election, but he did it anyway.  Kudos to Ben.  In 2020 the bar codes will be used in all elections in Iowa.

A big thank-you must go to Kayla Koether and others who pursued this case and now any Iowa absentee voter will be assured that if they mail their ballot on time, it will be counted!  So, that is why I suggest this legislation be known as 'Kayla's Law'!"