The complaint is here. and concerns the finding announced shortly before the election that the poll had Harris leading Trump among Iowans. The suit is against the Des Moines Register, the pollster and Gannett; the UDAP statute in question is Iowa Code § 714H.3(1). That statute provides:
A person shall not engage in a practice or act the person knows or reasonably should know is an unfair practice, deception, fraud, false pretense, or false promise, or the misrepresentation, concealment, suppression, or omission of a material fact, with the intent that others rely upon the unfair practice, deception, fraud, false pretense, false promise, misrepresentation, concealment, suppression, or omission in connection with the advertisement, sale, or lease of consumer merchandise, or the solicitation of contributions for charitable purposes. * * *
I would have thought that that meant that the statute applies only to the “advertisement, sale, or lease of consumer merchandise, or the solicitation of contributions for charitable purposes,” and so not to election reporting, but I’m no expert on Iowa law. If the Iowa statute does apply to reporting on an election poll, I suspect it would violate the first amendment, but neither am I an expert on the first amendment. The complaint describes the poll as “[c]ontrary to reality and defying credulity,” which may be hard to reconcile with the statutory requirement that the utterer of the misrepresentation intends others to rely upon the fraud. In any event, I doubt the defendants will end up paying $25 million, as happened in the Trump University case. In fact, I wonder about the wisdom of Trump suing people for making false claims about elections.
