Iowa sues Biden administration for citizenship status of over 2,000 registered voters

DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa officials on Tuesday sued the Biden administration for access to information on the citizenship status of more than 2,000 registered voters they had questioned in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election.

The complaint details a back and forth with the federal government after state election officials checked voter rolls against a list of people who identified themselves as noncitizens with the state's Department of Transportation. The vast majority of the 2,176 names had subsequently registered to vote or voted, meaning that some of those people could have become naturalized citizens in the lapsed time.

Secretary of State Paul Pate’s office requested information from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the citizenship status of those individuals but did not get it, the complaint alleges.

Federal authorities' “failure meant that the State had to rely on the best — imperfect — data it had available to ensure that no Iowan’s vote was canceled by an illegal, noncitizen vote,” a joint statement from Pate and Attorney General Brenna Bird said.

A DHS spokesperson said in an email Tuesday that the federal agency does not comment on pending litigation but added that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have “engaged with Iowa and will continue to correspond with them directly through official channels.”

Two weeks before Election Day, when early voting was already underway, Pate told county elections officials to challenge the ballots case by any of the named individuals and have them cast a provisional ballot instead.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa then sued Pate on Oct. 30 on behalf of four voters who are naturalized citizens but were named on the list, calling into question the accuracy of the DOT's information and alleging Pate infringed upon their right to vote. Their request for a stop to the ballot challenges was denied by a federal judge on Nov. 3.

It is illegal for non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections, but there is no evidence that it is occurring in significant numbers, though Iowa and some other states say they have identified dozens of such cases.

Some individuals in Iowa had registered to vote or voted before identifying themselves as noncitizens to the DOT, so Pate's office sent those names to law enforcement and Bird's office for investigation and potential prosecution. But Pate's critics have said even those individuals might be wrongly identified as noncitizens since the DOT data has proven unreliable.

The ACLU and ACLU of Iowa said in a statement that the state would be getting the information it needed from the federal government if it agreed not to misuse it.

“Studies, journalistic efforts, and repeated attempts by government officials in Iowa and nationally have found very few non-citizens who have voted, out of the many millions of people who vote," the statement said. "This wasteful lawsuit isn’t going to change that. State leaders should spend their time on actual problems that face our state.”

Pate's office has not released any additional information on the number of people who turned out to vote, whose ballots were challenged or whose citizenship status was ultimately confirmed. The Des Moines Register, based on preliminary information collected from 97 of the state's 99 counties, found at least 500 of the identified individuals proved their citizenship status and had their votes counted.

Another 74 ballots were rejected, according to the Register, mostly because those people did not return to prove their citizenship status.

The majority of the people on Pate's list did not vote in the 2024 election, according to the Register's data from county auditors.

Concern about elections being undermined by noncitizen voting had been a focus of political messaging this year from President-elect Donald Trump and other Republicans, even though such voting is rare in American elections.

Since no voter had been removed from Iowa’s lists, Pate tried to differentiate Iowa from other states, such as Virginia, where more than 1,600 voters were purged from the voter registration list in the past two months in a program enacted through an Aug. 7 executive order from Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

The Justice Department and a coalition of private groups sued Virginia in early October, arguing that state election officials violated federal law’s 90-day “quiet period” ahead of elections. The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority said that Virginia could continue.

Ahead of the Nov. 5 election, Pate said the DOT information was the “only list that we have available to us” without access to federal immigration records.

“We’re balancing this process. We want everyone to be able to vote. That’s why none of them have been taken off the voter rolls,” he said. But “we do owe an obligation to make sure that they are citizens now.”