Thirty-five ballots cast by non-U.S. citizens were counted in Iowa’s 2024 general election, according to Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate.
He announced Thursday that his office completed a review of more than 2,000 suspected noncitizens on Iowa’s voter registration list using the federal SAVE program, to which the state of Iowa recently gained access.
Pate said he found 277 people on the voter registration list who are not U.S. citizens. He said 40 of them voted in the 2024 general election, and five of those ballots were rejected and not counted.
There are 2.1 million registered voters in Iowa, and more than 1.6 million people voted in the 2024 election.
Pate said his office is sending the names of noncitizens who voted or registered to vote to law enforcement for investigation.
He has also proposed a bill to help verify citizenship status when people register to vote, and has filed a lawsuit against a federal immigration agency to get the Social Security numbers of immigrants.
“Maintaining election integrity is a team sport, and we need cooperation from multiple agencies, including the federal government,” Pate said in a news release. “We are hopeful that between our legislative proposals and this lawsuit, we will have the tools we need to verify voter eligibility during the voter registration processes, allowing us to ensure in the future, only eligible Iowa voters are participating in Iowa elections.”
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said the noncitizen voter cases have been turned over to the Iowa Department of Public Safety and her office.
"State and federal law are clear: only American citizens can vote," Bird said. "Law enforcement will first investigate these cases of alleged illegal noncitizen voting and registration. If charges are warranted, those cases will be referred to my office for prosecution to enforce our election integrity laws and ensure Iowans have elections that they can count on."
Pate says 12% of people on his suspected noncitizen list were noncitizens
Last October, two weeks before Election Day when early voting had already begun, Pate ordered election workers to challenge the ballots of 2,176 people on the state’s voter registration list. His office flagged them as potential noncitizens because they had, at some point in time, indicated to the Iowa Department of Transportation that they were not citizens.
Pate said he has since used the SAVE program to confirm that 277 of the 2,176 suspected noncitizens — or about 12% — are noncitizens. Most of the people on the list were eligible voters.
ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis Austen said she is interested to learn more about Pate's claims.
"These numbers show how flawed the secretary's illegally timed scheme — just weeks before the election — was," she said. "We know many U.S. citizens in Iowa were wrongly targeted. Our concern is how many eligible voters couldn't vote, which should also concern the secretary."
Pate's spokesperson did not respond to a question Thursday about how many eligible voters may have had their ballots rejected because they appeared on Pate’s initial list of 2,176 people.
Back in October, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official offered to verify the number of noncitizens on Pate’s list, but USCIS later refused to provide the names of noncitizens to the state. In response, Pate sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in December.
Pate was also sued in October by naturalized citizens and the ACLU of Iowa in an attempt to block his effort, but a federal court allowed Pate to move forward with his plan to challenge ballots. Iowa voters who were on the list of suspected noncitizens were required to show proof of citizenship to have their votes counted.
