Iowa Defense Alliance

After two years of thumbing his nose at open records advocates Iowa Governor Chet Culver has finally succumbed to the pressure. For the first two years of his term Culver and his lieutenant governor Patty Judge refused to use their state provided email accounts for government business. Instead the terrible twosome opted to use private email accounts for all of their business, both state and personal. Finally Culver and Judge are going to start regularly using their state provided email accounts to conduct official business.

According to the Des Moines Register Iowa law forbids state computers and email to be use for political and personal. Supposedly this is the law that Culver and Judge were using their private email account to avoid violating. Apparently it had not crossed the dynamic duo’s minds to use the state provided email account for state business and their personal email accounts for private and political matters. It is hard to buy Culver’s excuse for using a private email account instead of his state provided account. After all it is a simple matter to manage more than one email account at a time. I myself manage four of them on a daily basis. Two personal accounts, one for IDA, and one for school use.

If the leader of the State of Iowa cannot manage two such accounts there is something wrong. I don’t think that this is the case however. I think that Culver is perfectly capable of managing multiple accounts over the course of a business day, so there obviously had to be some other motivation behind this action. This administrations use of private email accounts belittles their supposed commitment to openness and transparency in Iowa’s government. In the end one has to wonder what did Governor Culver hide over the previous two years? The answer is one that we will probably never know.