Iowa, naturalized citizens settle lawsuit over voter eligibility ahead of 2024 election

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Iowa’s top election official and a group of naturalized citizens settled a federal lawsuit Wednesday that will prevent the state from relying exclusively on driver’s license records for citizenship data in the three months before an election.

The naturalized U.S. citizens sued Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate in late October 2024, alleging he infringed on their rights to vote when he directed election workers to challenge ballots from about 2,000 registered voters in an attempt to prevent people officials identified as possible noncitizens from voting.

A review of Iowa’s voter rolls last year found a fraction of that number — 35 people who are not U.S. citizens — were among more than 1.6 million Iowa voters who cast ballot in the 2024 election, and there were 277 noncitizens registered to vote out of nearly 2.3 million. Voting by people who are not U.S. citizens is illegal in federal elections, and there is no evidence it occurs in large numbers.

Pate’s office had compared the state’s voter rolls to a list of people who self-reported as noncitizens to the Iowa Department of Transportation. It then sent the list to county election officials two weeks before the election but did not attempt to contact the voters directly.

Pate, a Republican, said at the time that the transportation data was the best citizenship data source available because the office did not have access to federal immigration records under the Biden administration.

Under an agreement with President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, Iowa now can run searches for thousands of voters using names, birthdays and Social Security numbers through the federal government’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program.

That was one of the reasons Pate had argued to a federal judge that the lawsuit should be dismissed, saying the 2024 list of voters has been rescinded and that the claims are moot. That list also cannot be used for any future ballot-related challenges or efforts to maintain voter lists, according to the settlement.

In exchange, the naturalized citizens agreed to dismiss their claims. The settlement, signed by both parties, was filed in court Wednesday but had not yet been accepted by a federal judge.

Rita Bettis Austen, ACLU of Iowa’s legal director, saw the settlement as a win.

“The overwhelming majority of voters wrongly put on this list, including all our clients, are naturalized United States citizens who have the right to vote,” she said in a statement. “We are hopeful today’s settlement will safeguard Iowans from this happening again in future elections.”

But Pate and Iowa’s Republican Attorney General Brenna Bird also called the outcome a victory, pointing out that they are now using federal databases to verify Iowa’s voter rolls.

The secretary of state’s office used the SAVE program in its review last year, according to court filings. The program has been around for decades and is operated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a branch of DHS.

It has been significantly upgraded under the Trump administration, leading voting rights groups to sue the administration over concerns that eligible voters could be unlawfully purged from voter lists.