(Radio Iowa) – A House committee has approved legislation to require Iowans casting an early vote to put their voter I-D number or driver’s license number on the outside of the absentee ballot envelope. It would prohibit Iowa’s secretary of state and county auditors from accepting private donations to help run elections. Republican Representative Bobby Kaufmann of Wilton is one of the bill’s authors. The point of this bill is the banning of outside money for influencing public elections, ensuring that the voter ID loop is closed and we’ve checked off all of those boxes,” Kaufmann says.

The bill also updates the rules for election recounts — like the one in the second congressional district that saw some counties run the ballots through counting machines and others do a recount by hand.  “Bipartisan recount reform, so there’s uniformity across the system for all 99 counties,” Kaufmann says.

Representative Mary Wolfe, a Democrat from Clinton, says making recount procedures the same across all counties makes sense. She’s concerned about the change to require voters to write their driver’s license number or voter I-D number on what’s called the affidavit envelope for their absentee ballot. Wolfe says that needs to be prominently noted and clearly explained. “In order to avoid people completely, inadvertently not seeing that,” Wolfe says, “not realizing what it is, sending their absentee ballot back in and having their ballot not count.”

The bill also would let Iowa political parties post the date and time of caucuses on the party’s public website. Under current law, parties have to publish the date, time and location of precinct caucuses in local newspapers.