Student volunteers in electoral sprint

by Erin Petty

Features Editor

“She’s in prison,” Republican election monitor JoAnne Schneekloth told Patrick Midtlyng ’03 on Election Day, explaining why a Malcom resident hadn’t voted. “She hasn’t been released yet.”

As a Democratic independent contractor for Iowa’s 3rd District, one of Midtlyng’s Election Day responsibilities was to seek out additional voters. Other activities of his 20-hour day included trips to Malcom, calls to Des Moines, and transportation of students to voting sites at 7 a.m.

But for him, the election process began well before Tuesday. Midtlyng spent the summer in Iowa with the Democratic Party working on issues that included the state’s absentee ballot. “The Iowa absentee ballot is really technologically advanced,” he said. “We’ve received national attention for it.”

Midtlyng reported that the state’s Democrats in particular have taken advantage of Iowa’s absentee vote, through a combination of phone calling and door knocking. He said, “There’s a 3 to 1 absentee ratio of Democrats to Republicans, and in Poweshiek County the return rate [of Democratic absentee ballots] is 96 percent.”

The calls and knocks extended well into Tuesday evening. Midtlyng made several trips to the Malcom Auditorium’s voting station in an effort to monitor voter activity in Poweshiek County’s 14th Precinct. Before the election, Midtlyng and other Democrats surveyed Malcom residents and compiled a list of registered voters who identified with Democratic or Independent causes.

On Tuesday, he compared this list with the Declaration of Eligibility slips every voter filled out upon arrival at the auditorium. When finding a Democratic or Independent voter who had yet to vote, Mydtling contacted the person on his cell phone. “We call people to see if we can do anything to make the voting process easier for them,” he said, “like giving them rides.”

Contacting these people sometimes proved frustrating. “The address I’m looking for should be right here,” he said, “but this house is facing the wrong street.” In addition his activities with the 14th Precinct, one of Midtlyng’s Election Day duties included checking turnouts at bellwether precincts, which are considered to be representative of statewide voting trends.

He then called these results into the Democratic Headquarters in Des Moines. “[Bellwether precincts’] purpose is essentially to see how effective our get-out-the-vote message has been,” Midtlyng said. Midtlyng concluded his day by attending a results-watching party at the Poweshiek County Democratic Headquarters in Montezuma.

It was here that he learned the county’s Democratic voting activities. “Harkin, Vilsack, and Boswell all carried Poweshiek,” Midtlyng reported at a little past midnight Wednesday morning, his Election Day goals in part realized.