Iowa Supreme Court to decide by Friday if Abby Finkenauer will be on the primary ballot

“If you strip away the noise and the admittedly high stakes, this is ultimately a narrow question of statutory interpretation,” Assistant Solicitor General Sam Langholz said at the beginning of oral arguments before the Iowa Supreme Court on Wednesday afternoon. “Does a signature on a nominating petition missing a date get to be counted?”

The court was hearing an appeal of a Polk County District Court decision made late Sunday night that Abby Finkenauer had failed to qualify for the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in June. At issue are three signatures, two passages in Iowa Code and a standard adopted by the State Objection Panel 34 years ago.

The State Objection Panel consists of the Iowa Attorney General, the State Auditor and the Secretary of State, and hears challenges to the qualification of candidates in Iowa’s elections. During its March 29 session, the panel ruled on seven challenges to candidates, including one seeking to disqualify Finkenauer, the frontrunner in the race for the nomination to challenge eight-term incumbent Sen. Chuck Grassley in the general election.

That challenge was filed by Leanne Pellett, co-chair of the Cass County Republicans, and Kim Schmett, former chair of the Polk County Republicans. They contended Finkenauer had not met revised requirements for a statewide candidate’s nominating petition passed by the Iowa Legislature last year. Finkenauer did turn in over 5,000 signatures on her petitions, far more than the 3,500 required, but Pellet and Schmett claimed they failed to meet another requirement that the petition must include at least 100 signatures from 19 different counties.

The challenge ultimately came down to whether three signatures were valid: two from Cedar County, where the Finkenauer campaign collected 101 signatures, and one from Allamakee County, where it collected 100 signatures. In the case of Cedar County, one signer wrote the date as “6-6” — the signatures above and below it are dated “2-6” — and the other signer left the space for the date blank. The Allamakee signer’s address spilled over into the date section, so the space for the date had their zip code instead.

Pellet and Schmett’s attorney Alan Ostergren, who has represented the Iowa Republican Party and the 2020 Trump campaign in important election cases, argued to the panel that because section 45.15 (2) of Iowa Code states that each signer of a nominating petition “shall add the signer’s residential address, with street and number, if any, and the date of signing,” those three signatures cannot be considered valid, and without them, Finkenauer must be excluded from the ballot because her campaign did not collect 100 valid signatures from 19 counties.

Attorney General Tom Miller and Auditor Rob Sand, both Democrats, said that because it was clear from the other signatures surrounding those three what the correct date was, the petition was in “substantial compliance” with state law, a standard the panel has used since 1988 to assess challenges, and therefore the signatures were valid. Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, disagreed.

“It may sound trivial to some, and I agree, it sounds very sad that that’s what’s going to keep somebody off the ballot,” Pate said. “But at the same time, you’re running for something as high as the U.S. Senate or governor or any other office you need to make sure you’re doing all the detail work before you get started.”

Pate voted to uphold Pellett and Schmett’s challenge and exclude Finkenauer from the June primary, which would end her candidacy. But Miller and Sand voted against the challenge, so the panel rejected it 2-1.

Pellett and Schmett filed an appeal of that decision in Polk County District Court, arguing that the panel did not have the authority to decide what constitutes substantial compliance and needed to strictly adhere to section 45.15 (2). Representing the State Objection Panel, Sam Langholz pointed to a related section of Iowa Code, 43.14(2). That section specifies what should cause a signature on a nominating petition to be rejected.

“A signature line shall not be counted if the line lacks the signature of the eligible elector and the signer’s residential address, with street and number, if any, and city.” It also states that if any of the information on the signature line is “crossed out or redacted,” the signature is invalid. As both Langholz and the attorney from Finkenauer’s campaign stressed, lack of a date or an incorrect date is not among the specified errors that render a signature invalid.

Late on Sunday night, Judge Scott Beattie issued his ruling in the case, overturning the panel’s decision and ordering Finkenauer’s name “not be included on the primary ballot for the Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate.”

Beattie acknowledged the panel had relied on the substantial compliance standard for 34 years, but said that because the legislature had never explicitly given the panel the authority to determine what substantial compliance is, the court “owes no deference to the Panel’s legal interpretations.”

Beattie rejected the argument that an incorrect or missing date not being mentioned in one section of Iowa Code overrode the “shall add… the date of signing” requirement in the other section.

“The only logical interpretation of the statute, which gives it meaning, is that each signer must indicate the date they signed,” Beatie concluded. “It does not say that the date may be inferred or extrapolated from the context.”

Following that decision, Finkenauer issued a statement accusing Beattie, a Reynolds appointee, of doing “the bidding of Chuck Grassley and his allies in Washington,” who are afraid she will beat the seven-term incumbent in the November election.

On Monday, both the State Objection Panel and the Finkenauer campaign filed appeals of Beattie’s decision. The Iowa Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on an expedited basis, because the Secretary of State has said the slate of candidates for the June ballot must to be determined by Friday, so absentee ballots for the military and other overseas Iowans can be sent by the deadline to do so.

The arguments in front of the high court repeated those made in district court. Langholz and Gary Dickey, the attorney for the Finkenauer campaign, both pointed out that the Iowa Legislature has changed state election laws twice in recent years, but didn’t add a lack of date to the specified list of reasons to reject a signature and did nothing to stop the State Objection Panel from continuing to use substantial compliance as a standard.

“That’s a legislative preference,” Dickey said. “Certainly, the Legislature could have limited the panel’s ability to consider a signature line missing a date. They specifically chose not to.”

Justice Christopher McDonald appeared to be the most aggressively skeptical of whether the legislature intended to allow signatures without a correct date to be considered valid. He pushed the logic of that position to its extreme, suggesting that if the court allowed the three signatures to be counted because the State Objection Panel said the correct date could be determined from other information on the petition, then in the future, candidates could submit petitions with no dates at all, meaning it would be impossible to determine such things as whether a signer was of legal age or a resident of Iowa at the time of signing.

“As I see it, five of the six criteria for being an eligible elector are dependent on a status at a particular date,” McDonald said. “So why would we not require the date to be part of the petition?”

Alan Ostergren, representing Pellett and Schmett, also faced skeptical questioning over his assertion that state code mandates the correct date must be included for a signature to be valid.

Chief Justice Susan Christensen said section 43.14 “is pretty articulate as to which things will not count” and it does not list a lack of a correct date as reason to strike a signature.

“I struggle with that,” Christensen said about the idea that a problem with a date should automatically lead to an otherwise valid signature being rejected.

Dickey also argued, as he did before the panel and Beattie, that Pellett and Schmett lack standing to bring their challenge, because they are Republicans. Both the panel and the district court rejected that argument on the grounds that Iowa has same-day voter registration, meaning both Republicans could change their party affiliations and vote in the Democratic primary, even though neither said they intended to do so. On Wednesday, none of the justices seemed impressed by Dickey’s argument.

Speaking to Iowa News Now on Tuesday, Finkenauer said she was confident the Supreme Court would reverse Beattie’s ruling and allow her on the ballot. She also suggested that if the court ruled against her, it would be for partisan reasons. Six of the courts seven justices were appointed by either Gov. Reynolds or Gov. Terry Branstad.

“If the Iowa Supreme Court follows the law as it stands, and doesn’t decide to pick and choose based on who they like, who’s Republican, who’s Democratic and who they want on the ballot, we should be on the ballot come June, and again in November to beat Chuck Grassley,” she said in the interview on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling on Friday.