Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate and Attorney General Brenna Bird are suing the federal government for information they say it declined to give them before the Nov. 5 election that would have allowed officials to check the citizenship status of registered Iowa voters.
Bird and Pate, both Republicans, filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Des Moines that accuses U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of unlawfully refusing to answer Iowa’s requests about the citizenship status of 2,176 Iowa voters who Pate flagged as potential noncitizens. They’re demanding the agency turn over the information, and they’re asking a judge to order USCIS to answer future inquiries from Iowa about voters’ citizenship status.
Pate announced two weeks before Election Day that he was instructing county auditors to challenge the ballots of the 2,176 Iowans on his list if they tried to vote, requiring them to prove their citizenship before their vote could be counted. Those people previously reported to the Iowa Department of Transportation that they were not citizens and then subsequently registered to vote or cast a ballot, Pate said.
The lawsuit says two days after Pate’s announcement, a USCIS agent in Des Moines contacted his office and offered to help him check the citizenship status of the Iowans on the list.
But Pate says when his office contacted the USCIS office in Washington, D.C., they refused to release the citizenship information to him.
“To this date, after the November 5 election, USCIS has not provided that information,” the lawsuit says. “As a result of that failure to share information, 2,176 individuals (including noncitizen illegal voters) were subject to ballot challenges or showing proof of citizenship when they attempted to vote.”
More:Hundreds of flagged Iowans proved their citizenship and voted. Others had ballots tossed.
A spokesperson for USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Federal law says, “The Immigration and Naturalization Service shall respond to an inquiry by a federal, state or local government agency, seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual within the jurisdiction of the agency for any purpose authorized by law, by providing the requested verification or status information.”
The lawsuit says that Pate’s team received an email sent from the USCIS office in Washington, D.C., to the agency’s Des Moines office that said, in part, “we do not want you to release any information to the requestor. This (request for information) will require extensive research and review by multiple oversight offices.”
In a statement, Bird accused the Biden-Harris administration of “hiding” the citizenship information from Iowa.
“The Biden-Harris Administration knows who the hundreds of noncitizens are on our voter rolls and has repeatedly refused to tell us who they are,” Bird said in a statement. “But the law is clear: voters must be American citizens. Together, with the Secretary of State, we will fight to maintain safe and secure elections that Iowans can count on.”
A statewide review from the Des Moines Register found that nearly 600 people on Pate’s list tried to vote in the election. Of those, 506 proved they were citizens and successfully cast a ballot, while 74 had their absentee ballots rejected because they did not provide proof of citizenship.
Pate’s office has referred the names of 154 people on the list to Bird’s office and other law enforcement agencies for potential prosecution because they either voted or registered to vote and then later told the Iowa Department of Transportation they were not citizens.
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Iowa and federal law makes it illegal for noncitizens to vote in Iowa elections. In Iowa, it is a felony for noncitizens to cast a ballot or register to vote. Experts say cases of voter fraud are rare.
The lawsuit says the federal government did reach out after the election to offer Iowa access to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. Pate had said prior to the election that the database would help Iowa check voters’ citizenship status.
But in the lawsuit, Pate and Bird argue that access to SAVE is not sufficient to check the citizenship status of registered voters because SAVE requires the use of a “unique DHS-issued immigration identifier” and the state would only be able to check the citizenship status of Iowans who sign up for a driver’s license using that number.
Under current Iowa law, Iowa checks the eligibility of people who try to register to vote by comparing their information with Iowa Department of Transportation records, since proof of citizenship or legal residency is required to obtain an Iowa driver’s license.
But this method does not encompass every registered voter. The lawsuit says there are about 65,000 people in Iowa who registered to vote without using an Iowa driver’s license or ID card issued by the Iowa Department of Transportation.
Pate said in a statement that his job requires him to balance election integrity with voter participation.
“We’ve identified solutions that will allow us to verify voter eligibility at registration — not after they’ve cast a ballot,” he said. “The combination of access to the SAVE list, citizenship verification already completed by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the ability to verify using Social Security numbers will make the process so much more efficient and will also provide another important tool in our toolbox to safeguard our elections process.”
Along with USCIS, Pate and Bird are suing the agency’s director, Ur M. Jaddou, as well as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on Twitter at @sgrubermiller.
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