Miller-Meeks no longer registered to vote in IA-01
Literally shaking my head
This reporting and analysis first appeared at Bleeding Heartland and is shared here as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. For regular emails linking to all recent Bleeding Heartland articles and commentary, subscribe to the free Evening Heartland newsletter.
Sarah Watson had the scoop for the Quad-City Times: U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks no longer officially lives in Scott County, or anywhere in Iowa’s first Congressional district. In July 2025, she changed her voter registration back to the Ottumwa home she shares with her husband.
Aspiring candidates and campaign strategists could learn a lot from how Miller-Meeks has handled questions surrounding her residency over the past four years. It’s hard to believe an experienced politician could botch this issue so badly.
A SIMPLE PROBLEM WITH AN EASY FIX
Miller-Meeks was elected to Congress for the first time in 2020, in what was then Iowa’s second district. But the new political map adopted in October 2021 placed Wapello County in the third district, dominated by the Des Moines metro area. Most of the southeast Iowa counties Miller-Meeks was representing were part of the new first district.
That was not an unprecedented or complicated problem.
Although members of Congress are only required to live in the state they represent (not their U.S. House district), most would agree it’s a bad look not to have a home where you’re running for office. For that reason, Iowa’s nonpartisan redistricting process has often prompted U.S. House incumbents to move.
Democratic Representative Leonard Boswell’s Decatur County farm ended up in the solid red fifth district under the map adopted in 2001. Within months, he announced plans to move to Polk County, in the new third district. He and his wife bought an apartment in Des Moines, which they owned for more than a decade.
Following the 2010 census, Iowa’s new map placed Republican incumbents Steve King and Tom Latham in the new fourth district, and Democrats Bruce Braley and Dave Loebsack in the new first district. Even before state lawmakers voted on the redistricting plan, Loebsack made clear he would move to the new second district. Within days of the legislative votes, Latham announced plans to move to the new third district to run against Boswell (and avoid a GOP primary against King).
Loebsack announced in the summer of 2011 that he had closed on a house in Iowa City. He was re-elected in 2012 (and three more times) in the southeast Iowa Congressional district.
So the path for Miller-Meeks was clear: buy or rent a house or apartment in any of the 20 counties that are part of IA-01. She wouldn’t have to sell the Ottumwa home she and her husband shared—just like Boswell never sold his family’s farm.
For some reason, she didn’t do it the easy way.
MISSTEPS IN 2022
Soon after Iowa’s new map became law in 2021, Miller-Meeks indicated she would move into the redrawn first district, but hadn’t decided where to live. Fair enough.
For most of the following year, her new residence was a mystery. Iowa Starting Line’s Patrick Rynard was first to report in December 2022 that Miller-Meeks “registered to vote at state Sen. Chris Cournoyer’s house in LeClaire on the last day for pre-registration this year, then voted in Scott County the day before the election.”
That Oct. 24 date is important because it was the last day you could pre-register to vote in Iowa before the 2022 election. Doing so then would have given others the least amount of time to discover where in Scott County she sought to vote. Doing a same-day registration after that date would have required Miller-Meeks to show proof of residency for her new address.
I still believe Miller-Meeks is extremely fortunate the county attorney and auditor in Scott County (both Republicans) showed no interest in investigating her residency. Despite many attempts, I was never able to determine whether Miller-Meeks had any documents supporting her claim to reside at Cournoyer’s home.
Iowa’s official voter registration form requires the registrant to “swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that […] I live at the address listed above.” Documents that can prove residency include a lease or rental agreement, utility bill, bank statement, pay stub, or government document listing their new address.
The voter registration form warns, “If you sign this form and you know the information is not true, you may be convicted of perjury and fined up to $10,245 and/or jailed for up to 5 years.”
Miller-Meeks could have been investigated for voter registration fraud and voter fraud (since she cast a ballot claiming Cournoyer’s home as her address). I wrote at that time,
I’m astounded that an experienced politician and member of Congress would put herself in this situation. Miller-Meeks has considerable means, her personal financial disclosures show. Surely she could have spent a few thousand dollars to rent an inexpensive apartment somewhere in the first district for several months before the general election.
That way, she would have had a rental agreement and some utility bills to back up her claim to residence, if anyone questioned it. She wouldn’t have needed to change her voting address on the very last day of pre-registration, raising suspicions that she was trying to hide the ball, or had guilty knowledge that not everything was above board.
A MYSTERY IN 2024
Miller-Meeks had plenty of time to put things right before the 2024 general election. Yet she allowed her residence to remain a mystery. In August 2024, a Cedar Rapids Gazette reporter sent her spokesperson “a list of detailed questions about her address.”
Miller-Meeks’ spokesperson responded to The Gazette, “The congresswoman’s residence is in Davenport” but did not answer other questions.
It shouldn’t require investigative journalism to figure out where a member of Congress is living. Miller-Meeks made this more of a story than it needed to be. A constituent asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate the situation. (It appears that they took no action.)
Once the address became known, the Cedar Rapids Gazette ran a full-length story in October 2024 about Miller-Meeks’ Davenport apartment. A different constituent challenged her general election ballot, but a panel of poll workers determined she was eligible to cast a ballot in Scott County.
So it was settled: Miller-Meeks could continue to vote from her Davenport address, even if she spent more time at her home in Ottumwa.
From a news perspective, that should have been the end of the story.
“TO BE BY HER HUSBAND’S SIDE”
It wasn’t the end, though. Sarah Watson wisely requested Wapello County voter registration records, from which she learned Miller-Meeks changed her registration address to the Ottumwa home in July. The records indicate she didn’t vote in the November city or school elections in either Scott or Wapello counties.
Her spokesperson tried to spin the change as a virtue:
“Congresswoman Miller-Meeks has moved her residency back to their property in Ottumwa to be by her husband’s side,” Peter Owens, a spokesperson for the Miller-Meeks campaign, wrote in an email. “Miller-Meeks has lived in Southeast Iowa for almost 40 years and remains committed to serving the people of Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, having held over 280 events in all 20 counties this year alone.”
No one disputes her devotion to her marriage. But why on earth would she stir up more controversy about her residence? Just keep paying rent on the Davenport apartment, and keep your registration there.
As I’ve reported before, Iowa law on voter registration favors those who are wealthy enough to have multiple residences. You can vote at an address where you don’t sleep anymore (or have never slept), as long as your name is on the title, rental agreement, or utility bill.
Instead, we’re in for another round of “where does Miller-Meeks live” stories in 2026. Assuming she plans to cast a ballot for herself in IA-01, she will need to change her registration again before the midterm election. Journalists will compete to be the first to figure out where’s she’s ostensibly living and when she updated the address on her voter registration.
An incumbent in a safe district may not need to worry about optics, but Miller-Meeks is among the most vulnerable House Republicans in the country. She was re-elected last year by a margin of about 0.2 percent in a district Donald Trump carried by more than 8 points. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quickly put out a news release about Watson’s story.
Not only that, Miller-Meeks is facing a credible GOP primary challenger who was already citing her residency as evidence she’s not “trustworthy.” David Pautsch told me in February, “She still doesn’t live in the district. It’s just complete phoniness that she tries to pretend like she lives in Scott County because she rented an apartment there. I don’t think she’s ever brushed her teeth there, let alone lived there. It’s just fraudulent.”
I’m literally shaking my head. If anyone has a plausible explanation for why Miller-Meeks wouldn’t keep her voter registration in her Congressional district, please post a comment below.
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This is interesting. As far as residents can tell, she never did live at the Davenport apartment. I've been calling her out on the lie since speaking to people who do live there earlier in the year.
Thank you for sharing this reporting, Laura. Sarah did all of Iowa a favor by exposing this self-inflicted miss step. The why or how come portion is pretty straightforward in that Republicans in power now, have a different set of rules they are willing to enforce, or in this this example, willing to look the other way.