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Big turnout shows Iowans know how to vote

Participation is needed to keep our democracy strong

The 2020 general election was a blockbuster.

American voters turned out like they hadn’t in recent memory, casting a record amount of votes.

Iowa voters participated in a big way via absentee balloting or going to the polls. Secretary of State Paul Pate reported a statewide voter turnout rate of 75.73 percent.

According to Pate, there are 2,243,758 registered voters in the state. He reported that 1,699,286 of them cast ballots.

Locally, voters exercised their democratic rights in big numbers. In Webster County, voter turnout was 69 percent. In Hamilton County, it was 77 percent and county Auditor Kim Schaa called it ”the biggest response that I’ve ever seen.” In Humboldt County, voter turnout was about 80 percent.

Clearly, Iowans were motivated to vote. In the not-too-distant future, entire books will likely be written by those trying to explain this surge in voting. But the bottom line is this: people all over the country showed that they know how to vote.

That is a good thing. For more than 200 years, the United States of America has been showing the rest of the world what democracy is. Yes, sometimes, perhaps often, it is messy, but it is better than anything else ever tried. And for it to keep working, Americans have to keep voting.

We wish every election motivated voters like the most recent one just did.

Now that voters here and across the country have demonstrated that they can fill out an absentee ballot or find the voting booth, we call on them to keep on doing so.

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