Warren County is engaged in a heated race for the position of County Auditor. Many may not realize it, but the Auditor is not only the County’s Commissioner of Elections but is also the County’s Financial Officer, Tax Accountant, and Payroll & Human Resources Manager, among other responsibilities. The Warren County Democrats have held this position for many decades.
On May 31, 2023, Democrat Traci VanderLinden retired after 27 years as the Warren County Auditor. She had recommended that the Board of Supervisors appoint Kim Sheets, her Deputy Auditor, as the Interim County Auditor. Instead, the Supervisors decided to accept applications for that position; there were only two applicants: Kim Sheets, a Democrat, and David Whipple, a Republican.
On June 6 the Supervisors held an open, special meeting in which they interviewed each of the two applicants. The supervisors pointed out problems with the Auditor’s office over the years and stated it was time for new ideas and a new way of looking at things. The supervisors then unanimously chose David Whipple as Interim Auditor to complete VanderLinden’s term through 2024.
The Warren County Democrats were not happy and they claimed that if the supervisors had chosen Sheets there would have been a “smooth transition”; instead, the Democrats claimed, the supervisors showed their partisanship by choosing Whipple. The Democrats gathered enough signatures on a petition to call for a special election. A challenge by the Warren County Republicans was not successful. A special election for Auditor was set for Aug. 29 and Sheets and Whipple were then nominated by their respective county political parties.
I recently talked with Whipple. Whipple had attended the AIB College of Business where he graduated Summa Cum Laude with a perfect 4.0 GPA, earning a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration.
We discussed issues involving the County’s voting machines. Whipple said that when he first came to the Auditor’s office, staff showed him the “war room,” a small room that is attached to the Auditor’s office. The room was never locked and it had a desk in it that “many people come in and use whenever we have extra people in the office.” This room had a telephone and a laptop computer with wi-fi; this room was also where the County’s 39 voting machines were stored. Whipple has since required the room to be locked, with restricted entry.
Whipple conducted an inventory of the voting machines in the “war room” and found there were only 37; two were missing. An elections clerk told him that the two machines had some defects and had been picked up by the company that sold and serviced those machines. However, the elections clerk had no paperwork showing that. She said the company had just come by and picked up the machines. At Whipple’s request, she called the company. The company stated they had only one of those machines. Whipple said he and his staff spent a couple of days trying to locate the other machine, but they were not successful. Whipple then called the company and demanded the company search for the voting machine; he also told them that whenever they picked up a voting machine they were to give the Auditor’s office paperwork indicating that. A day later the company called back and said they had located the second voting machine. Whipple was able to establish that one machine had been picked up a few days after the November 2022 General Election; the other machine had been picked up sometime in April 2023. Neither machine had yet been repaired. The company offered Whipple a new machine to replace the machine picked up in November 2022. The company advised Whipple that the other machine would be repaired in time for the August election.
Whipple said that when a voting machine is purchased, a thumb drive on which the voted ballot information is to be stored is also purchased. There was a pile of such thumb drives in the “war room,” and each had a serial number on it. Whipple said an inventory list showed that there were supposed to be 106 such thumb drives. However, when he compared the list to the actual thumb drives, he learned that several on the list had been marked as damaged and had been thrown away, with no information about the nature of the damage or who had thrown them away; six thumb drives were unaccounted for; and there were two extra thumb drives with serial numbers not on his inventory list. Whipple then implemented a record-keeping system to better keep track of the thumb drives, and the thumb drives were kept in the locked “war room.”
Whipple thinks it is important to have bipartisan representation in all aspects of voting, ideally with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats in all stages of the process. He told me:
“I’ve reached out to both the head of the Republican Party and the head of the Democrat Party for help with finding poll workers to run this thing. I have not heard back from the Democrat Party at all. And that bothers me. I wonder, with their excitement to have this petition to have this election that they’d be all over wanting to go out there and work on it. And they haven’t even responded yet with one single name.”
Whipple said that it had been common practice for voting machines and other equipment to be delivered to a polling location on the Friday, or during the weekend, before the Tuesday election. Monitoring of that equipment was then left up to the individuals at that location. This was because the delivery responsibilities had been left to a single team of two individuals. Whipple said he will be creating a second team so the voting machines and equipment can be dropped off on the Monday before the election. Each team will consist of one Republican and one Democrat, and he expects each team to take a picture of the location in which the equipment was left and send it to the Auditor’s office.
We discussed business tax credits. Whipple had learned that the Auditor’s office had gone for six months without having a person assigned to processing applications for business tax credits. When a person was eventually hired to deal with this, that person was dealing with a six-month backlog and calls from disgruntled businesspeople who had applied for the business tax credits but had not received them because the Auditor’s office had missed deadlines in turning the required paperwork into the IRS. Whipple mentioned a new child-care business for which the Auditor’s office had missed two IRS filing deadlines in a row. Whipple asked an employee to research the matter and found that during the time period 2019 – 2023 there were 25 businesses in the County that had been unable to get their business tax credits in a timely manner due to the Auditor’s office missing IRS deadlines. Whipple said he is in the process of reconciling this matter.
Whipple also learned that the Auditor’s office had paid late fees to Iowa Municipal Utilities (IMU) every month over the last 18 months, amounting to several hundred dollars. He said this might have been going on longer than the 18 months he reviewed. This was not acceptable to Whipple and he is working to ensure that there will be no more late fees being paid.
Whipple talked about the fact that, although the Auditor’s office was supposed to be responsible for payroll, the Supervisors had taken that responsibility away from the Auditor’s office twice in the last few years. Whipple also mentioned that the Supervisors had taken away building maintenance responsibilities from the Auditor’s office (I had written about a building maintenance issue involving the Auditor’s office in 2020). From the tone of his voice, Whipple was bothered that the previous Auditor had allowed these to happen.
For years I have heard various complaints about our Auditor’s office, but little seemed to change in that office. Now we have first-hand information about what has been going on in that office and someone in there who is making changes for the better. The special election is August 29th. The Warren County Democrats called for a “smooth transition” to another Democrat Auditor, which means that little if anything would change. Warren County voters must vote for David Whipple to ensure that new ideas and a new way of looking at things continue, and by so doing, improve our Auditor’s office.
Author: Steve Kirby
Dr. Stephen M. Kirby is the author of six books about Islam. His latest book is Islamic Doctrine versus the U.S. Constitution: The Dilemma for Muslim Public Officials. He is also the Chair for the Warren County Republicans. The views expressed here are his own.
[…] As I had noted in my earlier article “Warren County: Voting Machines and […]