Alert from Progress Iowa

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 13, 2021

LEAKED VIDEO: RIGHT-WING GROUP CLAIMS CREDIT FOR WRITING IOWA’S VOTER SUPPRESSION LAW

Progress Iowa demands public release of all communication between Republican legislators, Governor Reynolds, and the Heritage Foundation as they claim to have “helped draft” the voter suppression law after working “quietly with the Iowa state legislature”

Des Moines, Iowa — Advocacy group Progress Iowa is demanding answers after a leaked video shows a right wing out of state group claiming credit for writing the widely criticized voter suppression law passed by the Iowa legislature and signed by Governor Reynolds earlier this year.

Heritage Action for America’s Jessica Anderson is seen in a leaked video reported by Mother Jones as saying that her organization “helped draft the bills” and that they “worked quietly with the Iowa state legislature.”

According to Mother Jones, Anderson claimed credit for an entire campaign to influence the legislature:

“Iowa is the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly and we did it quietly,” Anderson said. “We worked quietly with the Iowa state legislature. We got the best practices to them. We helped draft the bills. We made sure activists were calling the state legislators, getting support, showing up at their public hearings, giving testimony…Little fanfare. Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’”

Click here to read the full report in Mother Jones.

“Iowans deserve to know who is writing their laws, and we will immediately be filing open records requests to get to the bottom of this,” said Matt Sinovic, executive director of Progress Iowa. “This video shows what we have suspected all along: Iowa’s voter suppression law is part of a national effort to undermine our democracy, and Iowa Republicans were leading the charge to take away our ability to cast a ballot and conduct fair elections. The Governor and Republicans in the legislature must release every bit of communication they’ve had with the Heritage Foundation, so we can know the truth about their work with this shadowy group.”

The new voter suppression law was immediately challenged in court by the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa, and has already resulted in nearly 300,000 Iowa voters being moved to ‘inactive’ status by the Secretary of State.

###