Iowa

Iowa publishes active and inactive registrations as separate columns in the same monthly county report: 1,813,819 active against 342,362 inactive on August 3, grand total 2,156,181. The election-night feed's totalVoters field carries the grand total, so the state's published primary turnout of 19.17% is computed against a denominator that includes 342,362 people the same office classifies as inactive. Against active registrations the identical 411,785 ballots is 22.91%. A pipeline that reads either number without knowing which it got is wrong by 3.74 points on every turnout figure in the state.

Under § 43.65, if more than two candidates seek a state or federal nomination and none takes thirty-five percent, the primary is inconclusive and the nomination is made by party convention under § 43.78. Section 43.52 applies the same floor to county offices and to supervisor districts. So a primary can complete, be canvassed and certified, and still produce no nominee — and the person who eventually appears on the general ballot may have finished second, or not have run in the primary at all. Thirteen of 272 contests met the trigger condition this cycle.

Section 47.2 designates the county auditor as the county commissioner of elections, running registration and every election in the county, and denies home rule powers over those duties — so the administrator is a partisan elected officer with no discretion, and there is no board to look for. Section 39.17 then splits the courthouse across two four-year clocks: auditor and sheriff on one, treasurer, recorder and county attorney on the other. In 2026 the second group is up and the first is not, so the auditor conducting the election is not on it.

Section 49.31 has the state commissioner list all 99 counties alphabetically and assign each a number, and the order of candidates under every office title rotates from that number. Order is uniform within a county and across its precincts, and deliberately not uniform between counties. Anything that treats ballot position as a stable property of a candidate — deduplicating rows by position, or diffing two counties' ballots against each other — will find differences that are the statute working correctly.

Iowa's 940 cities and 342 school districts elect together on the odd-year calendar, not with the state. That calendar carries three distinct dates: a city primary in early October for the cities that adopted primary provisions, the consolidated city-and-school general in early November, and a city runoff in late November or early December for those that did not. Whether a given city uses the primary path or the runoff path is that city's own choice. A crawler expecting municipal offices on a November even-year ballot finds none in Iowa, and one expecting a single odd-year date misses two thirds of the local cycle.

Township trustee and clerk are filled by election or by appointment, and which one is a live question per township under § 39.22. A county board of supervisors may put the appointment question to township voters at a general election; if it passes, the board appoints as terms expire. It can be reversed later by another referendum, triggered by a petition of ten percent of the township's registered voters. So the same office is elective in one township and appointive in the next, and can change in either direction between cycles. The Census of Governments counts no township governments in Iowa at all.

School districts and cities routinely span counties, and § 47.2 resolves that by naming the county with the greatest taxable base inside the subdivision as the controlling commissioner. That county receives all nomination papers and public measures and certifies the ballot to the others by the forty-first day. So a district's filings live in whichever county holds the most assessed value, which need not be where its offices sit, where most of its voters live, or where its name points. A smaller county may also hand administration over entirely if fewer than 125 of the subdivision's registered voters live in it.

Section 39.21 puts four office classes on every general election ballot on a nonpartisan basis: county public hospital trustees, soil and water conservation district commissioners, county agricultural extension council members, and township officers. None appears in a party primary, so a pipeline built from primary nominations never sees them. The judiciary is a separate shape again — under § 46.16 judges stand for retention rather than election, eight-year terms on the supreme court and six on the court of appeals and district courts, with a yes-or-no question and no opponent.