By Robin Opsahl, Iowa Capital Dispatch
A settlement agreement was reached Wednesday in the lawsuit challenging Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate’s order 2024 pertaining to more than 2,000 people identified as potential noncitizens.
Pate and Attorney General Brenna Bird celebrated what they called an “election integrity win,” while advocates speaking on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union at a Wednesday news conference said the settlement provides “important safeguards” to protect Iowans’ voting rights in future elections.
The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Iowa and a law firm representing the League of United Latin American Citizens and other plaintiffs, challenged Pate’s guidance to county auditors in 2024, which challenged the ballots of voters identified as potentially not having U.S. citizenship.
These individuals had established themselves as noncitizens to the Iowa Department of Transportation or another government entity within the 12 years leading up to the order. Pate said the guidance, issued weeks before the 2024 general election, was necessary because the state was denied access to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to verify these individuals’ citizenship status.
The state filed its own lawsuit against the federal government in December 2024, accusing ICE under the Biden administration of unlawfully withholding citizenship information. Bird announced in December 2025 this lawsuit was settled through an agreement in which state officials can access the SAVE database for the next 20 years, with Iowa providing state driver’s license data to the federal government. A law was also signed in 2025 allowing Pate’s office to contract with federal and state agencies, and with private entities, for voter roll verification and maintenance.
The settlement in the lawsuit that was brought by the ACLU, LULAC and others listed as “potential noncitizens” is not yet finalized, according to an ACLU news release. As of Wednesday afternoon, the groups and individuals who brought the lawsuit have filed papers seeking to dismiss the case and adopt the settlement agreement, but a judge has not yet entered an order on the case.
However, details on the settlement were shared, which include agreements that the list used in 2024 will not be used in future elections or for future voter list challenges, removals or maintenance activities, and a requirement that future voter challenge lists within 90 days of an election will not exclusively rely on Iowa DOT data, according to the ACLU.
The Secretary of State’s office stated in a news release the office can now use the SAVE database and “no longer has need of the 2024 list, which has been rescinded.”
Bird said in a statement the settlement “underscores the importance of our agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that will help Iowa safeguard the integrity of our elections for years to come by making sure an illegal vote does not cancel out the legal vote of Iowa citizens.”
In March 2025, Pate stated that after using the SAVE database, it was determined that 277 of the 2,176 people flagged in the 2024 guidance did not have U.S. citizenship. While Pate and Republicans have highlighted this figure as showing the need for more safeguards against noncitizen participation in U.S. elections, ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis Austen said these figures also acknowledge that “at least 88% of those on the list were, in fact, U.S. citizens fully eligible to vote.”
Austen said the settlement will help prevent situations where eligible U.S. citizens have their votes challenged in Iowa elections. A majority of the people listed as “potential noncitizens” in the 2024 guidance were naturalized citizens who had the legal ability to vote.
“Iowans deserve elections that are free from this sort of unjustified, intimidating effort by our highest state officials to target fully qualified voters in a discriminatory and unreliable fashion,” Austen said. “It undermined both voting rights and people’s confidence in elections.”
Pate said in a news release that his office was committed to both ensuring “only eligible Iowa voters vote, and to empower all eligible voters to vote.”
“Election integrity and voter participation are not mutually exclusive — they support and strengthen each other,” Pate said. “Our goal has always been to verify citizenship proactively — at the point of registration rather than at the time of voting, and with access to SAVE and new legislative solutions, we have the tools to do so.”
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