This week's speaker was Travis Weipert, Johnson County Auditor, who spoke mainly about the upcoming elections but also about the Auditor’s office in general.
 
Announcements
 
Mark Patton, Peggy Doerge, and Herb Wilson have tickets for the Thursday Noon Club's raffle of a Highlander automobile.  See them for tickets.
 
Brian Adamec forms for the Nut Sales to benefit RYLA – the Rotary Youth Leadership organization.  He already has received about 4 cases worth of orders. 
 
President Myrene Hoover reminded Committee Chairpersons that some of the committees have not yet met, so the Chairs need to set a meeting date and time and contact their committee members.
 
Tickets are still available for the Annual Joint Service Club luncheon to be held October 1.
 
October 7th is a Summit Rotary Leadership Conference in West Liberty; now is the time to sign up.
 
Our club is required by Rotary International to have a Public Relations Chairperson and we do not have one, so a volunteer is being sought.
 
John Ockenfels reported that our club will host a leadership conference in February with about 30 attendees and is looking for a facility (preferably free) with a room large enough for 30, plus a break-out space for 15 persons.
 
Deb Ockenfels reminded us that cash donations for the winter coat project are still be accepted; please contact her to make a donation.
 
This Saturday, September 26 is the grand opening of the new Iowa City Animal Shelter from noon-3:00 p.m.; the last opportunity to tour the entire facility.
 
Speaker
 
       
 
Mr. Weipert is a graduate of Mounty Mercy College, worked at Aegon in Cedar Rapids for 13 years, was elected to the City Council in Tiffin, and has been serving at Johnson County Auditor after being elected 3 years ago. In Iowa, county auditors are required to perform a number of administrative tasks including:
 
A show of hands revealed that a large majority of Rotarians vote by early/absentee ballot in general elections.  Johnson County creates its own ballots in-house using State of Iowa guidelines; they are locally printed.  Iowa law stipulates how many ballots are to be printed for each election.  For a presidential election there will be about 70-80,000 ballots counted absentee ballots counted in Johnson County. Ballots are counted using three machines. At polling places there are both an m-100 ballot counting machine and a handicap accessible voting machine.  In a county building there is a high speed 650 counting machine which handles up to 1000 ballots a minute.  Although counting of absentee ballots may begin 2 days before the election, no election tallies are known until the polls close at about 9:00 p.m. on voting day. A bipartisan team opens sealed ballots, stacks them, and then places them in the high speed counter.  Any ballots not accepted by the machine are examined by the bipartisan team to see if the intent of the voter can be determined.  For instance, if a voter puts x’s in the empty ovals rather than filling them in, it could be determined what that voter’s intent was.
 
Voter registration is very easy in Iowa and voters may register at the polling places on the day of the election and be granted a provisional ballot even if they don’t have the authenticating documents with them.  There is very little voter fraud in Iowa and most of it is unintentional.  There have been four cases in recent years; one was a student voting at home in Illinois and also in Iowa City and three were cases where the Iowa Dept. of Transportation issued driver’s licenses to people and told them they were eligible to vote when they were not.  Travis would like to see Iowa polling places all connected to a central server (computer) where every voter who checks in to vote would be logged in immediately and double voting could be eliminated.  Because the USPS no longer postmarks all mail with a date and because mail service can be slow, it is best to mail absentee ballots no later than the Thursday before a Tuesday election to make sure they arrive in time to be counted.
 
Our Auditor’s teams work very hard to be certain that elderly and disabled/handicapped voters are able to vote in their homes or curbside or by absentee ballot so if you know of someone with special needs please contact the Auditor’s office.