Incentivizing Interference
How “Ordinary, Foreseeable, and Voluntary” Reframed the Record Used to Deny Ballot-Access Relief
By Sondra Wilson | Updated September 23, 2026
My political work predated my gubernatorial campaign. The false-record dispute predated my candidacy. And many of the litigation obligations that consumed the 2026 signature period arose from motions, deadlines, hearings, and court orders I could not simply ignore.
By 2026, Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. was not merely an abstract lawsuit sitting on a docket. As a self-represented litigant, I was personally responsible for the briefing, exhibits, discovery work, legal research, hearings, and responses required by the case. The burden had already affected my education before it collided with Iowa's 2026 signature-gathering period.
Before Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al., I had never filed a civil lawsuit and did not understand how procedurally demanding, expensive, and time-consuming this particular case would become. I was handling the case without counsel while attending college full-time and building a statewide campaign. By spring 2025, the litigation burden had already interfered with my education severely enough that I dropped classes; by 2026, those obligations were colliding directly with the ballot-access period.
That history is relevant to Judge Beattie's characterization because it shows why I dispute reducing the litigation to an ordinary personal obligation I simply chose to undertake.
The Question Should Be Larger Than “Who Filed the Lawsuit?”
My argument is not that every lawsuit filed by a political candidate should excuse compliance with ballot-access requirements. It is that calling a litigation burden “voluntary” cannot fairly end the inquiry.
A court confronting circumstances like these should also examine why the litigation existed, what interests were at stake, which obligations were imposed by motions or court orders, whether the candidate acted diligently, and whether narrowly tailored relief could preserve meaningful ballot access without disrupting election administration.
Those are the questions I contend were obscured when the burden was reduced to the fact that I was the plaintiff who originally filed Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al.
Political Sabotage:
Clearing My Name from False Allegations and Falsified Records
I began developing the political organization Wild Willpower in 2010, including multiple websites, publications, and a unique, comprehensive platform that is finally coming into view. What is currently presented online is much more developed behind-the-scenes, however in 2022 my work became interrupted and severely compromised after false allegations accusing me of crimes (e.g. stalking and harassment) and civil misconduct became entered into government records by a handful of individuals who, as I am currently attempting to prove in court, retaliated against me for filing a discrimination complaint against some local Ames, Iowa businesses they are affiliated with.
The records were lodged into the administrative record of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, and remained capable of being used to attack my reputation, undermine my political work, and take away my freedom via a malicious prosecution. Alongside the allegations, a misleading document containing false timestamps and re-arranged, out-of-context messages ("falsified document") made it appear as if I had performed the crimes and misconduct I was accused of.
The documents, capable of being accessed through a subpoena or other means, created a form of leverage that was essentially only visible to myself and the individuals who created it. The leverage increased after I announced my candidacy in March 2023, although that only amplified the already serious issue. Everyone knows that allegations of this nature can easily be used to take down a political campaign and permanently destroy a reputation.
On December 5, 2023 I filed Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. to clear my name by proving the allegations and related documents were false, however the proceedings themselves became extremely complex and dragged out across two courthouses, three judges, and multiple years.
Extraordinarily Complicated Court Case With Numerous Procedural Irregularities
Dragged Out for Years, Colliding With the 2026 Signature-Gathering Period
Although I could not afford an attorney, going by the Iowa State Bar Association's How to Represent Yourself in Court, Iowa Judicial Branch's Representing Yourself web pages, and by trusting in the inspiring and ornate imagery that lines courthouse walls throughout the state, I believed the court process itself was simple enough that if you show respect to the court, and are well organized, justice would prevail. Although I still actually do believe that, the process in this case, thus far, has shown exactly the opposite.
I mean no disrespect to the courts, but I believe any Iowan who reads the record—which is assembled into an eight-part series—will agree that this case became buried in litigation caused by abuse of process, and enabled by various court orders I am in the process of challenging before the Iowa Supreme Court.
Since the time this case was filed in 2023, the court never examined my exhibits, discovery was planned and requested, but was never allowed to occur., and the trial by jury that was scheduled for this fall, became cancelled after the Story County District Court accepted a dangerous argument by the defendants, which will set a devastating precedent for Iowans if it is not reversed.
I will summarize how this case-of-first-impression collided with my gubernatorial campaign below, however for a fuller, detailed explanation, please read the series and follow the appeal.
Instead of only linking to the series landing page, I am providing a link to each of the articles, a one-sentence summary, and one of several things not to miss in that article. As you read through the series, I want you to ask yourself two questions.
Is this how Iowa courts should operate?
Did this judges' order create justice, or compound injustice? (There are several orders to ask this question to.)
Is the State of Iowa's dark history of institutional mistreatment of LGBT+ people end? Or did it change forums, and is it quietly still happening in Iowa courts?
In 2026, while managing Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. as a full-time endeavor, I continued working diligently on the gubernatorial campaign I had worked on for years. Although I was on track toward gathering enough signatures, nine court deadlines in 2026, which each demanded days-to-weeks of research and preparation, made it impossible to manage make the June 2 signature deadline. But I did not simply miss the deadline and let it pass. Instead I contacted the Iowa Secretary of State's Office, who stated:
"There is no legal mechanism prescribed by Iowa statute.... This would come down to a court ruling instructing our office differently from the process laid out in Chapter 44..."
So I filed a suit in equity in Wilson v. Pate. I was not seeking money damages. I was asking the court to exercise its equitable authority to provide a practical remedy: additional time to complete the same ballot-access requirements Iowa law imposed on me.
And this was not an obscure request. Courts have, on many occasions, provided reasonable extensions to ballot access deadlines when extraordinary circumstances prevented candidates from meeting election deadlines.
However, instead of responding to the facts presented, Judge Beattie—appointed by Governor Reynolds—came up with a narrative that did not take into the account the severe threat that the nature of the false allegations or the modified document imposed.
He did not take into account the inevitability that allegations of sexual misconduct—which were planted into government records and which I possess the evidence to clear my name from—would otherwise be used to take down my gubernatorial campaign, had I not filed the suit.
And he did not take into account the fact that this was not speculation. Think about it: in this political climate, do you think that those allegations might have surfaced during my campaign, had I not first attempted to clear my name?
Here is what he wrote:
“The burdens Plaintiff identifies... as interfering with her signature gathering are the ordinary and foreseeable demands of the litigation she chose to bring...
The Petition asks the Court to extend a statutory ballot-access deadline because Plaintiff was occupied with other matters during the signature-gathering period.
The equitable power of this Court exists to address genuine injustice, not to relieve a party from the consequences of competing obligations she voluntarily undertook.”
I did not sabotage my own campaign. I did not ask for this. I acted diligently to clear this matter up, and when it became dragged out through circumstances beyond my control, I requested a solution that has been granted to other candidates.
Samantha Gronewald, Acting Under Color fo Authority as Polk County Judge
Some of the Workload Was Generated by the Court's Own Orders
Judge Currie: Weeks Spent Preparing for an Evidentiary Process the Court Later Abandoned
In 2026, Judge Doyle Expressly Directed the Work I Was Later Doing
The April 22 Order Told Me to Rewrite the Petition and Produce a Redline
Bethany Currie, Acting Under Color of Authoirty as Story County Judge
The materials I submitted on June 17 also documented that the workload in Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. was not simply the ordinary burden of having filed a lawsuit.
Under Judge Bethany Currie, the court initially established an evidentiary process. In a May 16, 2024 order, the court expressly asked whether the parties intended to present evidence so that “sufficient time may be set aside.” After I notified the court that I intended to present at least thirty exhibits, Judge Currie's May 28 order stated that the substance of the pending matters would wait until after the hearing so the parties could “present whatever evidence they believe is appropriate to do so at this stage of the case,” and expressly contemplated approximately thirty admitted exhibits and extensive testimony.
I spent weeks preparing in reliance on that process. My June 17, 2024 Amended Petition expressly identified Judge Currie's May orders and stated that the petition, “in context with the evidence,” would demonstrate why dismissal would create injustice.
The process later changed. After defendants objected to an evidentiary hearing, Judge Currie ruled on August 9 that there was “no reason” to receive evidence at a motion-to-dismiss hearing and limited the August 12 proceeding to legal argument. Then, on October 4, she expressly declined to consider the exhibits referenced throughout my petition, cited Rucker v. Taylor for the rule against considering outside evidence on a motion to dismiss, and dismissed most of my claims with prejudice before discovery had occurred.
That history matters here because substantial portions of the workload Judge Beattie later characterized as voluntarily undertaken arose while I was responding to court orders, preparing an evidentiary presentation the court had expressly contemplated, revising pleadings, researching procedural rules, and attempting to preserve claims before discovery.
The full sequence—including the court's later factual characterizations after declining to receive the referenced evidence—is documented in Sudden Reversal.
Angela Doyle, Acting Under Color of Authority as Story County Judge
Judge Doyle's April 22 order gave express instructions for what I must to do amend my petition.
While denying my motion for leave to amend to allow my Second Amended Petition and supporting evidentiary exhibits I filed in January 2026 from becoming operative—as documented in Dangerous Precedent—in the same April 22 order she provided specific instructions to cure the defects:
“This denial is without prejudice to Plaintiff filing a renewed motion for leave to amend that attaches a proposed second amended petition which complies with Iowa Rules of Civil Procedure 1.402 and 1.413, is concise, accurate, and the product of Plaintiff’s reasonable inquiry.
Any renewed filing shall include a red-lined comparison identifying changes from the operative pleading.”
The June 15 filing was not something I invented after the court had told me amendment was impossible. Judge Doyle had repeatedly told me that I could seek leave to amend. Most importantly, her April 22 order expressly denied the earlier version “without prejudice” and told me what a renewed filing had to contain: a concise, accurate proposed amended petition produced after reasonable inquiry, together with a red-lined comparison identifying the changes.
I spent the following weeks doing exactly that.
On June 15, I submitted the rewritten 62-page petition, organized exhibits, a summary of the major amendments, and the requested redline. Two days later, those same materials went before Judge Beattie in Wilson v. Pate as evidence of what this court-imposed obligation had actually required of me.
On June 22—two days after I filed my Notice of Appeal in Wilson v. Pate— Judge Doyle denied the renewed motion for leave to amendon July 15 and held that the earlier 2024 pleading remained operative. In ordinary language, that meant the comprehensive revised pleading I had spent those weeks preparing was not permitted to replace the older pleading as the document controlling the case.
attached affidavit gives you an especially clean ending:
“The filings were not discretionary or recreational.”
“I believed, and continue to believe, that judicial adjudication of the truth or falsity of those allegations was reasonably necessary to protect my reputation, professional activities, educational opportunities, advocacy work, publishing activities, and political candidacy.”
“I exercised diligence in gathering signatures. The overlapping litigation obligations described herein substantially reduced the time, attention, and resources available for signature-gathering activities during the statutory period.”
That was the factual record I placed before the court on June 17. I was not asking Judge Beattie to decide Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. inside the ballot-access case. I was showing him why the litigation existed, why I considered it necessary, how extensive its obligations actually were, and why I disputed his characterization of those burdens as ordinary, foreseeable, voluntary, or “self-created.”
When Judicial Failure Interfered With Democratic Reform
I did not develop these reforms from a distance. I developed them while attempting to navigate the very system they are intended to repair.
I ran for Governor because Iowa does not have to accept inaccessible courts, unaffordable legal representation, professionally insulated procedures, sweeping immunity doctrines, and a public education system that sends young people into adulthood without the practical legal knowledge needed to protect themselves.
But bringing those reforms before Iowa voters required qualifying for the ballot. As an independent candidate, I was required to collect thousands of signatures during a narrow statutory period.
During that same period, Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. imposed repeated hearings, filing deadlines, discovery obligations, exhibit preparation, and legal research. I was representing myself. The litigation had arisen from my effort to challenge false accusations and misleadingly presented materials placed into an Iowa civil-rights record—materials I could not responsibly leave unresolved while running for statewide office.
When those mandatory litigation burdens collided with Iowa’s ballot-access deadline, I asked the court for limited equitable relief. I did not ask to avoid the signature requirement. I asked for additional time to collect the same number of signatures required by law.
The court denied that request and characterized the litigation burden as “self-created” because I had initiated the underlying case.
That reasoning exposes the democratic stakes of everything documented on this page. A citizen may be forced to enter an inaccessible legal system to protect her rights and reputation. The system may then consume the time and resources required for political participation. And when she seeks limited relief from that collision, the burden may be treated as nothing more than the consequence of her own decision to seek justice.
The result was larger than one missed deadline. Iowa voters were denied the opportunity to decide whether they wanted the justice reforms described throughout this website—or the broader governing platform of which those reforms were a part.
The practical loss is also visible in the campaign infrastructure that had already been built. I have a closet full of campaign shirts, along with posters, banners, yard signs, business cards, fliers, stickers, and other materials prepared for a statewide race. If I am ultimately kept off the ballot, much of that work and expense will never be used for the purpose for which it was created. Those materials are another reminder that this was not a hypothetical candidacy or a last-minute idea—it was an organized campaign that had already been put into motion.
This is only a small sample of the campaign materials I invested in for the 2026 race. With a very limited budget, I purchased multiple colors of men's and women's shirts, posters, yard signs, banners, business cards, fliers, and other materials while much of my time over the past several years was already being consumed by casework and school. If I remain off the ballot, much of what I sacrificed to build this campaign will now sit unused instead of reaching the Iowa voters it was created to reach.
The practical consequence extends beyond my exclusion as a candidate. These ideas—including public legal education, scrutiny of immunity doctrines, accountability for governmental rights violations, and protection against the use of religious majorities to remove minority rights—may now be absent from Iowa’s gubernatorial debates. Voters may hear only the more comfortable range of positions presented by the two major-party candidates unless the Iowa Supreme Court grants relief in Wilson v. Pate.
I am not alleging that every person involved formed an express agreement to censor these ideas. But Iowans know the familiar expression: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Whatever label is placed upon the result, its democratic effect is the same: a candidate developed a distinct reform platform, mandatory court proceedings consumed the period available to qualify for the ballot, limited relief was denied, and the resulting debates may proceed without those reforms or the candidate advancing them.
Formal censorship is not the only way a political perspective can disappear from public consideration. Institutions can produce the same practical exclusion through burdens, deadlines, inaccessible procedures, and the denial of any meaningful remedy when those forces collide.
That is why this appeal concerns more than my individual candidacy. It concerns whether Iowa voters will receive the full range of ideas that a serious independent candidate attempted to place before them.
They were denied a full opportunity to consider the Civilian Restoration Corps, which would create tens of thousands of jobs rebuilding Iowa’s infrastructure and restoring its communities; the New Iowa Healthcare Compact, which would establish dependable access to essential healthcare; and Upskilling Iowa, an education plan that would bring innovative classes and practical programs into Iowa’s schools to strengthen the knowledge, skills, character, and well-being of future generations.
The opportunity to restore that democratic choice is not gone. That lost opportunity lies at the heart of Wilson v. Pate.
Why the Court's Denial Was Harmful
The court’s denial of my request for a limited extension did not simply maintain a deadline. It had the effect of deciding the election before voters ever had the chance to participate. The ruling did not appear to engage with the factual record I had submitted — including the litigation burdens, the mandatory nature of the deadlines, the public‑record harm, or the evidence showing that the Reliable/Lockwood case was not a voluntary personal project but a necessary effort to clear my name.
By treating the litigation burden as “self‑created,” the court effectively held that a candidate must absorb any amount of administrative or judicial harm — even when that harm arises from false records, altered documents, or unresolved allegations lodged into government files. The ruling rewarded interference, ignored the extraordinary circumstances, and left me without any meaningful path to comply with Iowa’s June 2 deadline.
A ballot‑access deadline cannot be treated as neutral when the State’s own administrative failures create the conditions that make compliance impossible. The denial did not preserve election integrity. It undermined it.
How Interference With a Campaign Became Interference With the Election
Election interference does not have to begin at the ballot box. When interference with a campaign prevents a candidate from reaching the ballot, it becomes interference with the election itself.
That is what happened here.
False public-record allegations, modified and out-of-context documents, unresolved administrative harm, overlapping court deadlines, discovery disputes, summary-judgment pressure, hearing preparation, and denied equitable relief combined to remove an independent transgender candidate from the ballot before voters could decide.
The result was not merely personal harm to me. Voters lost a choice.
I am not claiming every person involved shared the same private political intent. The point is the practical effect. A campaign can be derailed by process, delay, reputational threat, litigation burden, and institutional failure just as surely as it can be derailed by someone tearing up petitions or blocking access to voters.
That is how this kind of interference works. It often does not look dramatic from the outside. It can look like records being distorted, allegations being lodged into official files, years of self-representation, procedural burdens, hearings, briefing deadlines, discovery fights, and then a court treating the burden of defending oneself as if it were merely a voluntary scheduling conflict.
When that chain of events keeps a candidate off the ballot, the election has been affected. Voters are denied the opportunity to consider that candidate, the public debate is narrowed, and the statutory process becomes a barrier rather than a fair pathway to participation.
That is not a fair election environment.
The Larger Irony
Two facts make this outcome especially ironic:
1. I am a transgender woman fighting a civil‑rights case pro se in a state that recently removed gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act — and it was the state's own administrative failure that led to the lawsuit, and the state court that denied relief when the case interfered with my campaign.
2. I am the only gubernatorial candidate running with a comprehensive plan to make our courts more accessible and just — and yet, it was burdens imposed by our judicial system that knocked me off the ballot.
Throughout this article, I use “political sabotage” to describe the conduct I contend placed false, misleading, or materially altered accusations into government records in a way that threatened my reputation, my work through Wild Willpower, and eventually my campaign for Governor. The later ballot-access harm was one consequence of a dispute that began before I became a gubernatorial candidate.
Instead, proceedings in both the District Court and Iowa Supreme Court have progressively moved the case away from the underlying ballot-access question and into procedural disputes over legal authority, reconsideration, appellate timeliness, mootness, and the status of filings the District Court never expressly resolved. In my view, several of those procedural turns have depended upon mischaracterizations or omissions of material parts of the record.
The accumulating delay and procedural complexity created by the handling of this case have thus far effectively enabled and rewarded the campaign sabotage—keeping me out of the debate cycle. Time that could have been spent giving interviews, joining debates, and responding to Iowa voters has instead become caught up in procedural arguments created by the courts' repeated isolation of portions of my filings and forcing new, unnecessary questions around them.
Before unpacking the backstory—some personal history, what led me to run, and the factual details surrounding the campaign sabotage itself—first I will present the District and Iowa Supreme Court records for Wilson v. Pate (Polk County No. EQCE092993, Supreme Court No. 26-1268) so that you can examine the record for yourself.
As you will see, the courts' procedural detours, including repeated mischaracterizations and evasions, have continued to move this case away from the underlying material, while consuming and further derailing my campaign.
Had the District Court promptly granted the necessary relief after I filed this case before the June 2 deadline, unpacking this overly complex docket history would not be necessary.
I. How Two Cases Collided —
and My Campaign Was Forced Off the Ballot
I was not defeated by voters — I was removed from their consideration.
My campaign for Iowa Governor was not a last-minute undertaking. I had spent years developing a comprehensive platform for Iowa with fellow Iowans, organized around infrastructure and economic development, education, healthcare, and justice reform. I entered the 2026 election intending to bring those ideas before voters as an independent candidate.
But during the narrow period in which Iowa law required me to gather the signatures necessary to reach the ballot, two court cases collided.
The first was the civil-rights and false-records case, Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al.. I brought that case after what I contend were false allegations and materially altered or misleadingly presented records entered Iowa's civil-rights process.
But the burden at issue in my ballot-access case was not simply the ordinary workload of a lawsuit I chose to file.
By 2026, Reliable Street had stretched across multiple years, two courthouses, and multiple judicial assignments, with extensive motion practice, venue and service disputes, amendment proceedings, discovery disputes, and dispositive motions. During the signature-gathering period alone, it generated nine mandatory hearings and filing deadlines that directly overlapped the time in which I was trying to qualify for the gubernatorial ballot.
I also alleged abuse of process within that litigation. In general terms, abuse of process means using otherwise valid legal process for a purpose or result for which that process was not designed. My allegation was not merely that the defendants filed many motions. I alleged that procedural devices—including venue proceedings, service challenges, fee requests, pleading disputes, discovery disputes, and other filings—were used in ways that substantially increased the litigation's duration, complexity, cost, and burden for purposes beyond good-faith resolution of the underlying dispute.
That distinction became directly relevant when the ballot-access court later characterized the litigation burden as “self-created” simply because I had been the person who originally filed Reliable Street.
I directly challenged that characterization. In my June 17 motion for reconsideration, I told the court that the burden on my campaign “did not arise merely from the existence of litigation,” that the case was not “discretionary, recreational, or analogous to an unrelated personal project,” and that the litigation was reasonably necessary to address serious allegations and governmental records that threatened my reputation and candidacy. I asked the court to reconsider its conclusion that the resulting burdens were “self-created.” The motion also submitted the completed Reliable Street pleadings and exhibits so the court could evaluate the nature, necessity, complexity, and scope of the underlying litigation from the record itself.
The attached materials went further. They included an abuse-of-process claim alleging that procedural conduct had substantially increased the cost, duration, complexity, and burden of the Reliable Street proceedings. Exhibit G laid out that procedural history in detail.
The June 22 order expressly states that the court reviewed my motion, affidavit, and attached materials. But it did not explain why that expanded record failed to alter the “self-created” characterization.
The second was the ballot-access case, Wilson v. Pate. That case arose because those mandatory litigation obligations consumed substantial portions of the signature-gathering period. I therefore asked the district court for a limited equitable extension of Iowa's ballot-access deadline.
I did not ask the court to waive, reduce, or excuse Iowa's ballot-access requirements. I asked for additional time to satisfy them.
The district court denied that relief after characterizing the underlying litigation burden as “self-created” because I had initiated Reliable Street. I dispute that characterization. My position is that whether a litigation burden was voluntary cannot fairly be determined simply by asking who filed the lawsuit. The court must also consider what caused the litigation, why it was pursued, what obligations followed, and whether abandoning it was realistically possible.
I contend Reliable Street arose from damaging allegations and disputed government records that created foreseeable consequences for my reputation, public work, and candidacy. Leaving those records unchallenged while running for statewide office was not, in my view, a realistic alternative.
The resulting chain was straightforward: disputed government records led to litigation; mandatory litigation obligations collided with the ballot-access period; I sought additional time to satisfy the existing requirements; the district court denied relief; and my name did not reach the ballot.
That dispute reached the Iowa Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal on August 12 on the threshold issue of timeliness without reaching mootness or the underlying ballot-access merits. I am now asking the Court to set aside that dismissal.
If the appeal is reinstated, the larger question becomes whether extraordinary litigation burdens of this kind may justify equitable ballot-access relief—or whether they must automatically be treated as “self-created” whenever the affected candidate was the person who sought judicial redress.
But the two records answer different questions.
First, the timeline below follows Wilson v. Pate itself—what I asked the district court to do, how the court responded, why I sought reconsideration, and how the dispute reached the Iowa Supreme Court.
Then this page turns to the much larger underlying record in Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. because that history is necessary to understand the central factual dispute in the ballot-access case: whether the litigation burden that consumed my signature-gathering period was truly “self-created.”
That underlying history cannot fairly be reduced to the fact that I was the person who filed the lawsuit. To understand why, readers need to see what preceded the lawsuit, what happened after it was filed, how the record became increasingly fragmented, and why the litigation was still consuming enormous amounts of time during the 2026 election cycle.
The timelines come first. Then I will walk through that underlying case from beginning to end.
Following Political Sabotage, I Asked the Court for Additional Time to Make the June 2 Ballot Access Deadline
On August 12, the Iowa Supreme Court dismissed my appeal, concluding that I had not filed my Notice of Appeal on time.
Even though—based upon how the text of Iowa Rule of Appellate Procedure 6.101(1)(c) and Iowa Rule of Civil Procedure 1.904(4) are written—I did.
My position is based on the actual text of Iowa Rule of Appellate Procedure 6.101(1)(c) and the parallel language in Iowa Rule of Civil Procedure 1.904(4). Those rules expressly recognize an exception for a successive reconsideration motion when a court has modified its “order, ruling, judgment, or decree” and the later motion is directed only at that modification. The Iowa Supreme Court itself adopted that language after an earlier rulemaking process aimed at reducing uncertainty over when reconsideration motions extend appellate deadlines.
That is the rule I relied upon.
The Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion.
What the August 12 order does not explain is why.
The Court stated that it considered the jurisdictional filings—including my August 8 supplemental response—and concluded that my second motion to reconsider did not extend the appeal deadline. But it did not identify what part of my argument failed.
It did not say:
June 5 did not modify the May 28 ruling.
It did not say:
June 17 was not directed only at the modification.
It did not explain why In re Marriage of Waller and Kill—a June 2026 Iowa Court of Appeals decision applying this very rule—did not support my argument.
And it did not explain why the content-based analysis in Waller and Turner did not apply here.
That matters because my August 8 filing had put the issue squarely before the Court.
In Waller, the district court formally denied reconsideration, just as the district court did in my case. Yet the Iowa Court of Appeals held that the ruling could still constitute a modification because:
“in determining whether there was a modification, we look at the content of the ruling.”
My August 8 filing then compared the actual content of the two orders in my case:
May 28: the district court said my petition failed “at the threshold” and expressly stated, “The Court does not reach the remaining considerations.”
June 5: after I supplied additional legal authority, the court reached those previously undecided considerations and determined for the first time that my litigation burden was nonexternal, ordinary, foreseeable, voluntarily undertaken, and effectively “self-created.”
My argument was simple:
The result remained “denied.” But what the court had actually decided changed.
That is why I treated the June 5 ruling as a modification, filed a timely motion directed at that new determination, and then filed my Notice of Appeal 28 days after the June 22 ruling on that motion.
The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal anyway.
And because the order does not tell me why my interpretation of the modification rule failed, I have now had to file another motion just to get back to the point where the Court can consider the case itself.
Before We Go Any Further, Here Is What This Case Is Actually About
I am about to spend considerable time explaining a jurisdictional dispute that has almost nothing to do with the injustice that brought me into court in the first place.
So before I do that, I want readers to understand the larger story.
My political work was sabotaged in 2022.
This occurred while I was building Wild Willpower and before I had decided to run for governor.
I contend that serious accusations—including accusations of stalking and harassment—and materially altered or misleadingly presented communications were placed into Iowa's civil-rights process. By the time I finally obtained the underlying submissions, I believed I could document that communications had been rearranged and altered in ways that made accusations against me appear true. The resulting records threatened work and a public reputation I had spent years building. The underlying article series documents those allegations and the evidence I rely upon in detail.
After announcing my candidacy, I filed suit to clear my name and seek accountability.
That lawsuit is still not resolved.
It has traveled across two courthouses and multiple judges. The record became fragmented across administrative materials, transferred filings, motions, pleadings, exhibits, dismissed claims, attempted amendments, discovery disputes, and later summary-judgment proceedings.
A document I contend was materially altered has never received the substantive examination I sought.
Full discovery never occurred.
Claims were narrowed and dismissed through interlocutory rulings before the broader factual controversy received a full merits adjudication.
I could not obtain legal representation.
There was no meaningful media scrutiny.
And while I continued trying to reconstruct and litigate that case myself, I began running for governor.
Then, during the narrow period in which Iowa required me to gather petition signatures, the Reliable Street case generated nine mandatory hearings and filing deadlines.
That litigation collided directly with my campaign.
So I Asked the Courts for Help Before the Deadline Ran Out
This is important:
I did not miss Iowa's June 2 deadline and then decide afterward that I wanted an exception.
I went to court before June 2.
Before doing so, I contacted the Secretary of State's office and asked whether there was an administrative extension, cure process, emergency review mechanism, partial-submission procedure, or some other way to preserve ballot access under extraordinary circumstances.
The Director of Elections told me there was no administrative mechanism and that any departure from the statutory process would require a court ruling instructing the Secretary of State differently.
So I did exactly that: I went to court while there was still time for a court order to matter.
I was not asking to skip the signature requirement.
I was not asking to lower the number of signatures.
I was not asking to be automatically placed on the ballot.
I asked for a brief extension so I could satisfy the same requirements after extraordinary litigation obligations had consumed much of the qualification period.
Courts have recognized ballot-access relief when extraordinary outside events interfere with signature gathering. One of the authorities I presented was Esshaki v. Whitmer, where COVID restrictions interfered with candidates' ability to collect signatures and judicial relief followed. My June filings cited that case precisely because it demonstrated that ballot-access requirements are not categorically beyond judicial adjustment when extraordinary outside circumstances collide with constitutional ballot access. Your district court later distinguished Esshaki by deciding that my circumstances were not similarly external.
And that distinction—whether what happened to me was genuinely “self-created”—is exactly what I have been trying to get a court to seriously adjudicate.
Instead, the Ground Kept Moving
The first district-court ruling did not decide whether my circumstances were extraordinary.
It denied relief because I had not supplied enough legal authority establishing that a court could grant the equitable extension I requested.
So I supplied more authority.
And the court then acknowledged that an important premise of my argument was “well-founded”: Iowa courts do possess equitable authority to address extraordinary roadblocks to the exercise of legal rights.
But relief was denied again—this time for a different reason.
Now the court said that because I had initiated the Reliable Street lawsuit, the resulting litigation obligations were essentially ordinary, foreseeable, voluntary, and “self-created.”
So I responded to that.
I submitted a much more complete factual record showing what the litigation was actually about, why I believed clearing my name was necessary, and why I contended the burden had been magnified through abuse of legal process.
The court said it reviewed those materials.
It did not explain why they failed.
It simply left the “self-created” characterization in place.
There was another problem as well.
On June 1, I had separately filed a Motion for Leave to Amend and a proposed Second Amended Petition designed to cure the deficiency the court had identified.
That separate motion was never expressly granted or denied.
My August 14 Supreme Court filing now points out the resulting procedural problem: if that motion remained pending, one timeline follows; if it was implicitly denied, the record never says when or why; and if the court treated the amended petition as operative, then the case entered a different adjudicative posture. Yet the jurisdictional dismissal does not address any of those possibilities.
Then I appealed.
The Supreme Court did not reach whether the district court's “self-created” characterization was correct.
It did not reach whether there remains a workable route to the November ballot.
It did not reach mootness at all.
Instead, it asked me first to establish appellate jurisdiction.
I did.
I filed extensive jurisdictional briefing, including the recent Waller decision, Turner, the relevant rule text, and sworn evidence establishing that I remain a candidate seeking the November ballot, still possess approximately 1,000 signatures, intend to satisfy the full statutory requirements, and am prepared to resume intensive petition circulation and proceed on an accelerated schedule.
The Court nevertheless dismissed the appeal as untimely.
And again, it did not explain which part of the jurisdictional argument failed.
So Today I Filed 32 More Pages Just to Ask the Court to Explain—or Correct—That Result
On August 14, I filed a 32-page Motion to Set Aside the August 12 Dismissal and Reinstate the Appeal under Iowa Rule of Appellate Procedure 6.1208(1)(c).
Procedendo has not issued. That matters because Rule 6.1208(1)(c) expressly provides a procedural mechanism for asking the Court to set aside an appellate dismissal before procedendo returns jurisdiction to the district court.
The motion asks the Court to:
reinstate the appeal;
hold that the June 5 ruling modified the May 28 ruling;
hold that my June 17 motion was directed only at that modification;
hold that my July 20 Notice of Appeal was timely;
and move quickly enough to preserve whatever meaningful election relief remains available.
If the Court declines to reinstate the case, I have alternatively asked it to tell me—and Iowa lawyers—why the modification exception does not apply here.
And that last part has implications well beyond my candidacy.
The Iowa Supreme Court revised these rules after acknowledging concerns about uncertainty over precisely this kind of appellate-deadline problem. Its 2016 rulemaking order said the amendments were intended to reduce controversies over when reconsideration motions toll an appeal deadline.
Now my entire appeal may rise or fall on an interpretation of that very rule that the dismissal order does not explain.
Now We Have to Talk About Jurisdiction Before We Can Talk About Justice
This is the frustrating part.
The jurisdictional dispute is not the underlying case.
It does not tell you whether the documents were altered.
It does not tell you whether false accusations were used against me.
It does not tell you whether Reliable Street was prolonged through abuse of process.
It does not tell you whether calling that litigation burden “self-created” was fair.
And it does not tell you whether I should still be given the opportunity to complete Iowa's ballot-access requirements and appear before voters in November.
It determines whether the Supreme Court will ever reach those questions.
That means I now have to spend part of this article explaining reconsideration motions, appellate deadlines, “modified” rulings, procedendo, Waller, Turner, and a procedural rule most Iowans have probably never heard of.
Some readers may want to skip that part.
I understand.
But if you have ever wondered how a person can enter a courthouse with a serious problem and emerge months—or years—later still fighting over procedure while the original problem remains unresolved, I encourage you to read it.
Because that is the larger subject of this series.
The question is not whether courts need procedural rules. They do.
The question is whether those rules are producing justice—or becoming additional barriers between ordinary people and adjudication of the harms that brought them to court.
The process is now scrutinizing the procedural path I used to seek appellate review more closely than any court has ever scrutinized the underlying record that forced me to seek review in the first place.
At this point, saying I am “disappointed” in Iowa's judicial system would be an understatement.
I still hope the Iowa Supreme Court proves that criticism wrong.
Its review of my August 14 motion is now pending.
Who I Mean by "Outside Actors"
These are the “outside actors” I referred to at the beginning of this article.
They were not officials administering Iowa's ballot-access laws. They were defendants and other participants in the separate Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. dispute whose conduct, I alleged, produced the administrative and judicial record that I spent years attempting to investigate and challenge.
By June 17, Judge Beattie no longer had to rely merely upon my description of that burden. I placed the underlying record before him.
What I saw when I finally reconstructed that record was far more serious than an ordinary interpersonal disagreement. I saw accusations of talking, harassment, racism, anti-LGBT+ conduct, unauthorized activity, and other misconduct placed into an official government process; contemporaneous communications that I believed materially contradicted those accusations; documents that I alleged had been modified or presented in materially misleading form; and multiple submissions that appeared to reinforce one another.
From that record, I inferred coordination, intent, and malice. I did not regard the resulting government record as merely embarrassing or inconvenient. I regarded it as a potential political weapon designed specifically to be used against me at a future date by the defendants or by anyone else who knew about their existence and may wish to attack my credibility, my campaign, political, or life's work (including Wild Willpower), and my legacy.
They could also be used to initiate a malicious prosecution against me, and then subpoena them to bring them into evidence.
Because I had told several of the defendants about the false assault charge and related arrests in 2006 and 2009 only two days before I was mysteriously barred from Reliable Street. and Lockwood Cafe property owned by LOVE CLUB LLC and largely controlled by defendant Lyndsay Nissen, those criminal charges could have been brought into evidence in the same case in order to have me wrongly framed and locked up in prison. I had no choice but to file Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. to prove what I know to be true, and to disarm the trap that had been set:
False statements, a modified document, and selectively excerpted statements were submitted to the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, indefinitely lodged into government records, and capable of effectively destroying me and my life's work.
Exhibit F Was Particularly Important to the "Self-Created" Issue
One exhibit was particularly important to the “self-created” issue.
Exhibit G documented the factual basis for an abuse-of-process claim I was attempting to bring in Reliable Street. It laid out a chronology of litigation conduct that I alleged had unnecessarily expanded and prolonged the case—including overlapping pre-answer motions involving venue, dismissal, recasting, pleading demands, service challenges, costs, and attorney fees before discovery had even begun.
That did not require Judge Beattie to decide whether abuse of process had occurred. But it was directly relevant to the premise underlying his June 5 ruling.
If I was alleging that the litigation burden itself had been magnified through abuse of legal process, then the resulting workload could not fairly be dismissed merely by observing that I was the person who originally filed the lawsuit.
The Revised Second Amended Petition likewise alleged that the defendants had used filings, procedural challenges, venue and service disputes, fee requests, discovery disputes, and related proceedings for purposes other than good-faith resolution of the underlying factual dispute, substantially increasing the litigation's cost, duration, complexity, and burden.
That was the distinction I was trying to put before the ballot-access court:
The burden did not arise merely because I decided to spend my time suing someone. I contended that serious allegations had been placed into an official civil-rights record, that those allegations threatened my reputation and candidacy if left unresolved, and that the resulting effort to obtain judicial redress had itself developed into unusually complex litigation that I alleged included abuse of process.
Seeking judicial redress for serious allegations placed into a government record is not a voluntary hobby—and the resulting litigation burden does not become “self-created” merely because the injured person filed the lawsuit.
My June 17 motion therefore argued that the litigation was not “discretionary, recreational, or analogous to an unrelated personal project.” It arose from allegations that were false, defamatory, selectively excerpted, altered, misleading, and which had entered an official administrative record.
A Clarification About the Administrative Record
My June 17 filing described administrative records broadly as publicly accessible. The Iowa Civil Rights Commission's historical rules were more restrictive. During the complaint process, personally identifiable investigative records were generally treated as confidential, and Rule 161—11.17 limited access to the case file. But the rule expressly allowed a party or the party's attorney to obtain access after issuance of a right-to-sue letter.
That distinction does not eliminate the concern I was trying to describe; it makes the sequence more precise. The disputed allegations first entered a confidential government administrative record that I could not fully inspect during preliminary screening. Once the administrative process ended and I was sent to court, those same allegations became relevant to public judicial litigation, where pleadings, motions, exhibits, and derivative filings could become part of the public record.
These Were Not Minor Accusations
The seriousness of those allegations was not merely my characterization. In Judge Currie's October 4, 2024 order (in the Reliable Street Case) addressing my defamation claim, she concluded that some of the statements were capable of defamatory meaning because they could impute crimes to me—most notably harassment and stalking—impair my ability to work, or expose me to hatred, contempt, or ridicule. The court therefore allowed the written-defamation claim to proceed.
The same order also held that, although the ICRC staff were required to keep the information confidential, submission of the statements to the ICRC investigator itself satisfied the publication element of defamation.
That is why I did not regard leaving the record unresolved as a harmless option during a statewide campaign. My concern was not simply that old accusations existed somewhere in an agency file. It was that serious allegations with potential criminal implications had entered an official government record, later became part of active litigation, and could foreseeably surface through the ordinary scrutiny applied to a candidate for governor.
The completed filings also showed the scale of the case: multiple defendants, multiple categories of alleged misconduct, extensive communications, administrative proceedings, and years of motion practice, venue disputes, service disputes, amendment proceedings, discovery disputes, and dispositive motions.
And by that point, the underlying burden was no longer hypothetical. During the signature-gathering period I had already been required to prepare major pleadings and exhibits, reply briefing, discovery, a motion to compel and resistance to summary judgment, and two hearings—including one on May 26, only days before the June 2 ballot deadline.
The issue was therefore not merely whether litigation consumed time. It was what caused the litigation, why I believed it could not responsibly be abandoned, what happened inside that litigation, and whether those resulting court-imposed burdens could fairly be labeled “self-created.”
I Asked for More Time Before Time Ran Out.
The Court Process Then Consumed the Time I was Trying to Preserve.
When I first sought judicial relief in May, there was still time for relief to accomplish something meaningful.
Before filing suit, I contacted the Iowa Secretary of State's Office and asked whether any administrative extension, cure procedure, emergency review process, partial submission, or other mechanism existed to preserve ballot access under extraordinary circumstances. The Director of Elections responded that Iowa statute provided no such mechanism and that any departure from the Chapter 44 process “would come down to a court ruling instructing our office differently.”
So I went to court before the deadline passed.
I was not asking to be placed automatically on the ballot. I was not asking to waive Iowa's signature requirement or county-distribution requirement. I was asking for additional time to satisfy the same requirements after extraordinary litigation obligations had consumed much of the period in which I was supposed to gather signatures.
That timing matters.
I did not wait until the election calendar had run out and then ask the courts to rescue my campaign. I asked for relief while there was still time for that relief to work.
What happened next created a second problem.
The May 28 order denied relief because I had not supplied sufficient legal authority for an equitable extension. I then spent additional time during an election emergency researching that authority, filing a motion to reconsider, seeking leave to amend, and preparing an expanded petition.
After I supplied that authority, the June 5 order acknowledged that an important premise of my argument was “well-founded”: Iowa courts possess equitable and supervisory authority to address extraordinary roadblocks to the exercise of legal rights. But relief was denied again on a different ground. The court now characterized the underlying litigation burdens as ordinary, foreseeable, and effectively “self-created.”
That sequence matters because the first denial required me to spend more of the very time I was asking the court to preserve establishing authority that the court later acknowledged existed.
Then I had to respond to the new “self-created” determination.
Then I had to appeal.
Then I had to brief appellate jurisdiction and mootness.
Then I had to answer the State's arguments.
And now, in mid-August, the November election is approaching while I am still litigating whether I should have received additional time back in May.
The remedy has been shrinking while I have been trying to obtain it.
That is no longer merely an inconvenience. It is part of the injury.
The original Reliable Street litigation had already consumed substantial portions of my signature-gathering period. I contend that litigation itself grew out of serious failures in Iowa's civil-rights process: disputed allegations entered an official administrative record, I was unable to fully examine the respondents' submissions during preliminary screening, and I ultimately had to turn to the courts to try to adjudicate what had happened.
That underlying litigation then collided with my campaign.
When I asked the courts for a limited remedy to that collision, the effort to obtain the remedy became another major litigation obligation of its own.
So the chain is no longer simply:
Reliable Street litigation → lost campaign time.
It has become:
administrative failure → Reliable Street litigation → lost campaign time → emergency ballot-access case → additional motions and appeals → still more lost campaign time.
And election time is not interchangeable with ordinary time.
A week lost in May or June cannot simply be returned in October. Campaigns depend upon momentum, public appearances, media coverage, debates, voter contact, fundraising, volunteer recruitment, and repeated opportunities to introduce ideas to the public. Time spent litigating ballot access is time not spent participating meaningfully in the election for which ballot access was sought.
That is one of the harms that is becoming increasingly difficult to repair.
Iowans are choosing their next governor in November. Yet instead of spending this period primarily presenting my platform, speaking with voters, seeking interviews, participating in public forums, organizing supporters, and building a statewide campaign, I have had to devote enormous amounts of time to litigating whether I should have been given additional time to qualify for the ballot in the first place.
Even a later legal victory cannot fully recreate the campaign period that has already passed.
That is why this case presents a structural ballot-access problem extending beyond my own candidacy.
If extraordinary outside circumstances can substantially consume a candidate's qualification period, but obtaining judicial relief requires litigation that consumes the remaining period, the calendar itself can eventually defeat the remedy.
A candidate could ask for relief while relief is still useful, litigate diligently, and ultimately prevail only after the passage of time has made meaningful participation in the election far more difficult—or practically impossible.
Election law should not create incentives for interference by making delay more powerful than remedy.
If political, administrative, or legal interference can consume a candidate's qualification period while strict deadlines remain fixed and judicial review cannot occur quickly enough to repair the harm, then whoever causes the interference may benefit from the simple passage of time.
That creates an obvious danger.
A system designed to protect elections should not make sabotage effective simply because the courts cannot adjudicate its consequences quickly enough.
This is also why debates about election reform must begin one step earlier than questions about how votes are counted.
Ranked-choice voting, open competition, and other reforms may expand voter choice once candidates are on the ballot. But all of those reforms presuppose something more fundamental:
Candidates must first have a meaningful opportunity to reach the ballot.
Changing the method by which votes are counted cannot solve the threshold problem if extraordinary interference can prevent a candidate from qualifying and the judicial system cannot provide effective relief before the election calendar overtakes the dispute.
There is a broader access-to-justice problem here as well.
Legal rights become difficult to exercise in practice if an emergency request can be denied on one threshold ground, denied again on a newly introduced ground after that first deficiency is addressed, and then denied again after the factual record is expanded without an explanation of why that expanded showing failed to alter the analysis.
This case did not begin because I wanted another lawsuit.
It began because I asked for time.
I asked while time still mattered.
The chronology that follows shows how the process of deciding whether I was entitled to that time became another burden—and how, while that process continued, the election calendar kept moving forward.