T-R PHOTO BY SARA JORDAN-HEINTZ Sunday afternoon, Democratic candidate for Iowa Secretary of State Deidre DeJear made a campaign stop at the home of Karen Lischer and Rep. Mark Smith. She said if elected, she would work to increase voter registration and turnout and help small business owners.

Deidre DeJear, Democratic candidate for Iowa Secretary of State, said two things make her stand out from her opponent: a desire to mobilize voter turnout and find ways to create incentives that allow small businesses in Iowa to thrive.

A native of Mississippi, who currently lives in Des Moines, this is the first time DeJear has run for elected office.

“Right now, we don’t have a Secretary of State (Paul Pate) that believes it’s his job to get out the vote,” she said. “He thinks it’s the parties’ jobs and candidates’ jobs, but we have a lot of races in this state that are non-partisan – school board and city council – races we see a low turnout for, but we know those races are very critical, too.”

She said a mere 13 percent of registered voters cast a ballot in this year’s primary; and the number of those who are eligible to vote but don’t has the power to swing an election.

“There are 450,000 people in Iowa who are eligible to vote who aren’t registered,” she said. “Women have struggled for the right to vote and African-Americans battled Jim Crow laws in the South. The pathway has already been made to exercise our right to vote.”

If elected, DeJear said she would work to find ways of better connecting people with election and voting information.

“It’s 2018. The Iowa Secretary of State could be staying in touch (with the public) using email, and it wouldn’t cost anything,” she said.

In addition, DeJear would like to see high schools, colleges and universities hold more voter drives to help boost the voter turnout of the age 18-29 demographic.

“When you go to the DOT to get your driver’s license or ID and you’re eligible to vote, you should be automatically registered to vote, but aren’t,” she said. “We should be able to change voter registration automatically when people move, and work with energy companies, that way when people move and change their bill, they can also change their voter registration as well. Those are simple, systematic things that aren’t going to cost real money to do.”

DeJear told the Times-Republican that in addition to increasing voter turnout, if elected, she would work to help business owners thrive.

“We don’t want the (Secretary of State’s office) to be a burden on our business owners,” she said. “We should be doing a better job of providing them with the resources to help them grow – whether it’s access to capital, access to education. We can’t take for granted that somebody coming in to start a business knows exactly how to conduct business in our state. Let’s connect them with the Iowa Workforce Development, Internal Revenue Board, etc.”

DeJear is a co-founder of Back 2 School Iowa, a non-profit that works with communities and corporations in order to provide resources to inspire youth in continuing in their education and build their future careers. Her business, Caleo Enterprises, aims to provide entrepreneurs affordable marketing tools and business strategies.

In 2012, while campaigning for President Obama, she developed and implemented a program to educate and mobilize voters, which led to an increase in African-American voter turnout.

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Contact Sara Jordan-Heintz at (641) 753-6611 or sjordan@timesrepublican.com