This article by Michael Wines in The New York Times is published by The Seattle Times. Here is an excerpt:

In November, Roxanna Moritz won her fourth term unopposed as the chief election officer in metro Davenport, Iowa, with more votes than any other candidate on the ballot.

Five months later, she quit. “I emotionally couldn’t take the stress anymore,” she said in an interview.

For Moritz, a Democrat, the initial trigger was a Republican-led investigation into her decision to give hazard pay to poll workers who had braved the coronavirus pandemic last fall. But what sealed her decision was a new law enacted by the Iowa Legislature in February that made voting harder — and imposed fines and criminal penalties on election officials for errors like her failure to seek approval for $9,400 in extra pay.

Read the full story here.