(Radio Iowa) – County auditors are raising concerns about proposed rules from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office that would require the same training for every part-timer and volunteer who works on Election Day. Jenny Hillary is deputy commissioner of elections in the Dubuque County Auditor’s Office.

“There’s a lot of election personnel at the elections and all of the required training might not be necessary for people who are just picking up election night results or dropping something off on election morning,” she says. Election workers who open absentee ballots are trained on the rules for early voting and election workers at each precinct who screen voters and hand out ballots are trained about Election Day voting rules.

“And our election staff who are just picking up results to get back to the courthouse so we can timely get them uploaded to the state, so the public can see, probably don’t need all of the voter check-in process,” Hillary says. Eric Gookin, legal counsel for the Secretary of State’s office, says he and others on staff are reviewing those concerns. “Part of the trick is that the (Iowa) Code language says, is pretty flat about anybody who works in a polling place on Election Day,” he says, “and so we’re really looking at that to see if we can further define that down to address some of those issues.”

The proposed guidelines for training of what Gookin calls “precinct election workers” or P-E-Os were discussed this week during a meeting of the legislative panel that reviews all the rules state agencies develop. “The list of training requirements, the topics we chose were those that we already do heavily training on, both us and the counties, as sort of a baseline starting point, so that way everybody — all PEOs across the state are getting a similar baseline training,” Gookin says. “They also are reflective of the questions that we most frequently get from either the public or counties as we’re doing trainings.”

Gookin says the secretary of state’s office is developing new training materials, too.