After Iowa’s legislature failed to pass a constitutional amendment to restore the voting rights of felons, Governor Kim Reynolds says her sights are on signing an executive order. While the language has not been agreed upon, the governor continues conversations with her legal team, Des Moines Black Lives Matter, NAACP, and ACLU before signing an order. Senator Rich Taylor remembers Governor Tom Vilsack making a similar executive order, but says why a constitutional amendment needs to be passed, “She can say well you got to have all your restitution paid, you got to do this and that. She can make it whatever she wants, but the problem is once she goes out of office, so does her executive order. Then we are at the whim of the next governor, Democrat or Republican, and what they want to do. That’s why we need a constitutional amendment passed through because now we won’t be able to do it until 2024 would be the soonest they can get their voting rights back via constitutional amendment because it has to pass through two separate legislative sessions.” 

Representative Joe Mitchell is also supportive of an executive order, “I’ve been in support of her doing executive orders from the beginning. I think she was always going to do an executive order if the legislature didn’t pass the constitutional amendment. I think she’s always had that in her plan to do, so I was happy to see that she’s kinda kept her word on that.” While the executive order has not been signed yet, Governor Reynolds has said she intends to sign the order as soon as the language of the order is complete. Iowa is the only state in the nation to require felons to apply to the governor’s office in order to restore their voting rights.