Secretary of State Candidate, Ryan Peterman
Candidate Website: Home - Peterman for Iowa
Do you have a plan to vote?
Know your candidates, know your precinct, and know how to cast your ballot — all three matter.
👉 Candidate Info: browse the navigation menu above to explore every candidate on your 2026 ballot.
👉 Precinct & District Info: tinyurl.com/mystateandlocalcandidates
👉 Voting Info: iwillvote.com
General Election: Tuesday, November 3, 2026
Ryan Peterman is a Bettendorf native and Navy veteran running for Iowa Secretary of State on a promise to rebuild trust in how Iowa runs its elections. A graduate of Bettendorf High School and the U.S. Naval Academy, Peterman comes from what he describes as a family of teachers, veterans, and small business owners — values he says shaped his decision to return home to Iowa and run for office.
Peterman served roughly a decade as a U.S. Navy officer and helicopter pilot, deploying with the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group to the Indo-Pacific and Middle East. He later served as an honor education and remediation officer at the Naval Academy and as a speechwriter for the Naval Academy superintendent, before working as a legislative fellow for U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen focusing on national security, defense, and veterans policy.
Peterman is basing his campaign in the Quad Cities and has pledged to visit all 99 Iowa counties and build direct working relationships with county auditors, who administer elections on the ground. “I'm not running to be a partisan warrior,” Peterman has said. “I'm running to do the work, to serve with integrity, and to help rebuild trust in the system we all depend on.”
Fun fact: Peterman flew helicopters off aircraft carriers deployed to the Indo-Pacific and Middle East before turning to public service back home in Iowa.
Ryan Peterman's campaign centers on expanding voting access and restoring transparency to an office he says has drifted toward partisan restriction rather than nonpartisan administration.
Restoring early voting. Peterman wants to restore Iowa's early voting window, which the Republican legislature cut from 29 days to 20 days. “The same amount of work has to be done, we have shorter amount of time to do it,” Peterman has said, arguing the shorter window is an access barrier, not a security measure.
Protecting mail voting. Peterman wants to protect and expand absentee and mail-in voting access for Iowans who can't easily get to the polls.
Restoring voter attestation. Peterman opposes the elimination of “attestation,” which had allowed a voter to vouch for another voter's identity, saying there's no evidence of fraud tied to the practice — and he's pledged to push to restore it.
Election Day as a holiday. Peterman supports making Election Day a state holiday, both to boost turnout and to make it easier to recruit poll workers.
Accountability and transparency. In July 2026, Peterman filed public records requests seeking documentation on what voter data — including driver's license and Social Security numbers — the Secretary of State's office shared with the U.S. Department of Justice, along with internal communications about that decision. He's argued that other states have refused similar federal data demands and that Iowans deserve to know why their information was handed over.
A trusted partner to county auditors. Peterman says the Secretary of State should be a nonpartisan partner to Iowa's 99 county auditors — the officials who actually run elections locally — rather than a partisan actor directing them.
Ryan Peterman has built his campaign around a commitment to show up in every one of Iowa's 99 counties and build direct relationships with county auditors — a pledge that puts Black Hawk County squarely on his itinerary, not an afterthought to a Des Moines or Quad Cities-focused campaign.
The issues at stake are directly relevant to the Cedar Valley. Black Hawk County is home to a large University of Northern Iowa student population in Cedar Falls, and the shortened early-voting and absentee-mailing windows Peterman wants to reverse disproportionately affect students, shift workers, and other voters who need more flexibility to cast a ballot.
Peterman's pledge to be a “trusted partner” to county auditors gives local election officials and organizers in Black Hawk County a candidate they can work with directly, rather than around — a meaningful distinction for a county running its own elections under increasingly restrictive state rules.
Ryan Peterman's opponent for Iowa Secretary of State is Republican incumbent Paul Pate, who is seeking a fourth consecutive term after previously serving as Secretary of State in the 1990s and as mayor of Cedar Rapids.
Background. Peterman is a Navy veteran and first-time candidate who spent a decade in uniform before entering public service. Pate is a longtime Iowa politician and businessman who has held the Secretary of State's office, on and off, since 1995.
The 2024 voter purge. Two weeks before the 2024 election, Pate ordered county auditors to challenge the voting eligibility of 2,176 registered voters based on outdated state DOT records. A follow-up review found only about 12 percent of those flagged were confirmed non-citizens — meaning roughly 88 percent, many of them legitimately naturalized citizens, were wrongly targeted. The ACLU of Iowa sued on behalf of affected voters, including a Turkish-born college professor and a Welsh-born naturalized citizen.
Cutting early voting. Pate's office implemented a 2025 law cutting Iowa's early-voting window from 29 to 20 days, moving poll closing up an hour, limiting ballot drop boxes to one per county, and requiring absentee ballots to arrive by Election Day rather than simply be postmarked by then. Pate has defended the changes as strengthening “election integrity”; Peterman has called them an access barrier based on a supposed problem — voter fraud — that Pate's own office has confirmed is exceedingly rare.
Sharing voter data with the federal government. In 2026, Pate's office confirmed it shared Iowa voter data — including driver's license and Social Security numbers — with the U.S. Department of Justice. Peterman has filed public-records requests demanding to know why, noting that other states declined similar federal requests.
The bottom line: this is a race between a Navy veteran promising to expand access and rebuild nonpartisan trust in Iowa's elections, and a longtime incumbent whose recent record includes a voter purge that wrongly flagged the vast majority of the citizens caught up in it, a shortened voting calendar, and new questions about handing Iowans' personal data over to the federal government.