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Judicial Watch and our office agree about two fundamental things: (1) Big Tech censorship is one of the most important issues our country is dealing with and (2) it is vital that voter rolls across the county are maintained to ensure the accuracy and integrity of our election system. The issue here is simple, Judicial Watch made claims regarding Iowa’s voter list maintenance practices that do not match up with the data they claim to rely on.

In their original press release, Judicial Watch claimed that eight Iowa counties had more registered voters than eligible electors. Additionally, the organization insinuated that Iowa conducts “dirty elections” and had failed to perform voter list maintenance. When our office used the same data, we were unable to recreate their analysis. We asked them multiple times to correct their data and even issued a press release calling out their misinformation.

Judicial Watch claims to have used 2018 Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) data that was released by the federal Election Assistance Commission in 2019 for their figures regarding voter registration. Additionally, they claimed to have used the 2017 U.S. Census Bureau’s five-year American Community Survey data to get their total population figures. These data points are all contained in the chart below, and as you can see their claims cannot be verified using these figures.

Because Judicial Watch’s claims did not match the objective data, and they refused to correct their claims, a member of our staff reported their posts to Facebook and Twitter as misinformation. This decision was influenced by training the staff member had received the week before from the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (an agency created by President Trump in 2018) regarding reporting misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms. Neither Facebook nor Twitter removed Judicial Watch’s content.

Following this exchange, our office has put into place a policy on how to handle alleged misinformation and disinformation. This office will no longer report content to a platform or network provider and will instead attempt to educate the content creator on the facts regarding Iowa’s election laws.

Author: Press Release

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