Iowa Sues Biden Administration Over Noncitizen Voting Data
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird (R) and Secretary of State Paul Pate (R) sued President Joe Biden’s administration, alleging that it is refusing to hand over the citizenship status information of over 2,000 registered voters on the state’s voter rolls.
The lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have refused repeated requests for “election integrity data” to confirm if there are noncitizens registered to vote in the Hawkeye State. As a result, the lawsuit claims that the state has instead had to rely on “imperfect” data on hundreds of alleged noncitizen voters on the state’s voter rolls.
Under Iowa law, anyone who gets a state driver’s license or ID has to provide proof of citizenship. But the lawsuit claims more than 65,000 Iowans who registered to vote without a driver’s license or ID — thus making their citizenship status unverified. According to the lawsuit, Pate’s office identified more than 2,000 registered voters suspected of being noncitizens and, in order to verify these voters, reached out to the USCIS to verify their citizenship status. The lawsuit claims that “the Secretary’s team received an email from USCIS (Washington, DC) to Iowa USCIS staff that included the quote: ‘We do not want you to release any information to the requestor. This RFI will require extensive research and review by multiple oversight offices.’”
Pate’s office used out-of-date records from the Iowa Department of Transportation to determine the citizenship status of more 2,000 registered voters and then sent the list to counties with instructions to challenge their voting eligibility to have them removed from the state’s voter rolls. Pro-voting groups sued over these actions and a judge ruled against those groups days before the election allowing the affected voters to cast provisional ballots.
“I am suing for the Biden-Harris Administration to finally release the election integrity data that it has been hiding from Iowa,” Bird said in a statement. “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. 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.”
Iowa is one of several Republican-led states that sued the Biden administration over noncitizen voting. Prior to the November election, GOP officials in Florida, Ohio and Texas similarly sued the Biden administration over citizenship records to maintain their voter rolls. Much like the lawsuits in these states, the Iowa lawsuit claims it doesn’t have access to the immigration identification numbers to cross-check with the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program — a database that state and federal agencies use to check immigration status for an individual.
Throughout the 2024 election, GOP officials spread much disinformation about noncitizen voters. Since at least 1996, noncitizens have been banned from voting in federal elections. But numerous GOP claims and lawsuits allege that thousands of noncitizens illegally vote in federal elections, despite overwhelming evidence that the phenomenon rarely occurs.