By Marissa Payne, Des Moines Register
Civil rights groups are asking Iowa county auditors to reinstate eligible voters who they say auditors improperly removed from registered voting lists before the Nov. 5 election.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa and the national ACLU discovery sent a reminder to county auditors that state and federal laws bar counties from removing people from voting rolls within certain windows before an election.
Under state law, voters whose registrations were challenged within 70 days before an election (beginning Aug. 27) cannot be removed.
Federal rules block states from removing voters within 90 days before an election (beginning Aug. 7). Challenges may be processed again after an election.
The ACLU accused Johnson, Pottawattamie and Muscatine counties among Iowa’s 99 counties of wrongly removing individuals from county voting lists whose registrations had been challenged too close to the election.
But Johnson and Pottawattamie county auditors told the Register that although they had received more than 600 challenges combined in August and subsequently removed those voters in September, they believe those challenges fell outside the state’s 70-day window and were eligible to be acted upon.
The Muscatine County auditor said its voter challenges came even earlier in July, also outside the state’s restricted window. The auditor has since reinstated two voter registrations that were canceled after Aug. 27 to “inactive” status, meaning they would have to request an absentee ballot, vote or update their registration to be returned to “active” voter status.
Guidance issued in September by the U.S. Department of Justice states that “once an election for federal office is less than 90 days away, processing and removals based on systematic list maintenance must cease” under the National Voting Rights Act.
Under Chapter 48 of Iowa Code, “a challenge filed less than 70 days before a regularly scheduled election shall not be processed until after the pending election.”
Asked whether the groups were considering litigation, ACLU of Iowa communications director Veronica Fowler said the group wouldn’t speculate.
“We take federal law and state law that protects voters around the time of the election very seriously,” Ari Savitzky, senior staff attorney with ACLU’s voting rights project, said in a Tuesday news conference.
The requests for mass removals from Iowa’s voter rolls are unrelated to Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate’s directive last week to county auditors that poll workers should challenge more than 2,000 registered voters who he says may be noncitizens.
Mass challenges to voter registrations have been in the spotlight after the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed the state of Virginia to remove roughly 1,600 voters from its rolls that state officials believe are noncitizens.
A federal appeals court on Sunday upheld a federal judge’s order restoring those registrations, ruling the systematic purge of voters within 90 days of an election was illegal under federal law.What are Iowa’s voter registration challenge rules?
The ACLU shared an email from the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office dated Oct. 23 to county auditors and attorneys indicating that the office recently was alerted by a nonprofit vendor, VoteShield, that “a number of counties appear to have continued processing challenge-related cancellations during this 70-day freeze period.” The vendor helps monitor voter registration data for anomalies.
“If the information that we have is correct, and your county did process cancellations as part of a voter registration challenge, we strongly suggest your offices meet to discuss whether reversing those challenges until after election day is prudent,” elections administrator Emma Overschmidt wrote.
The Iowa Secretary of State’s office has not responded to questions from the Register about which counties it said were improperly removing registered voters.
There are some exceptions to state law that allow auditors to process challenges and remove someone from a county’s voter rolls.
A challenge received within 20 days of a new registration or a change to a voter’s existing registration may be processed when the auditor determines that sufficient evidence exists to warrant cancellation. Additionally, a challenge may be processed immediately if the registrant is dead.
Under federal law, voters may be removed from voting lists at the registrant’s request, if the registrant dies or if the registrant is mentally incapacitated or under criminally convicted as provided by state law.
Florida State University election law professor Michael Morley said within the 90-day window before an election, voter records may be updated individually based on particular information about a specific record, but systematic updates are prohibited.
“DOJ and multiple courts have interpreted this to mean states generally may not compare existing records in voter registration databases against other databases (like motor vehicle records) to look for ‘matches’ identifying potentially ineligible voters or outdated records during this period, because such efforts would be ‘systematic,'” Morley said. “Likewise, courts have held that large-scale challenges to numerous voters also qualify as ‘systematic,’ especially when they are not based on much individualized information about each record at issue.”
When Iowa county auditors received voter registration challenges
The Pottawattamie County Auditor’s Office in western Iowa removed about 600 voters from its rolls in September after receiving challenges from county resident Mike Roberts on Aug. 26, 71 days before the election, Auditor Melvyn Houser said Tuesday.
Houser said he understood the state’s directive to mean that “if the challenge comes outside of that 70-day window, we can go ahead and act on them.”
The challenged voters were people who had changed their addresses but hadn’t notified the auditor’s office, county elections administrator Marilyn Kennedy said. Houser said the auditor’s office sent letters to those addresses on its voter rolls and to the forwarding address notifying voters their registrations were challenged.
“We did hear back from some of them,” Houser said. “Others we did not. When those bounced back as undeliverable, they were removed from the rolls.”
Two challenged registrants moved back to the county and registered at their new address, Kennedy said.
Houser said his office does not plan to reinstate voter registrations unless it receives orders to do so, believing it acted within state law. Houser said he has not received guidance from the Secretary of State’s Office suggesting the auditor’s office acted wrongly in removing voters.
Johnson County in eastern Iowa has received mass voter registration challenges of more than 1,000 voters each in 2023 and 2024, but data provided by interim Johnson County Auditor Erin Shane doesn’t indicate those voters’ registrations were improperly removed from challenges brought forward by Tom McInerney.
Of the 1,023 voters McInerney challenged in June 2023, all but 10 had their registrations canceled July 7, 2023.
The county received 1,076 voter registration challenges June 12. Only 12 were not canceled.
Another smaller batch of challenges that were removed, however, may fall within the state and federal windows blocking county auditors from removing voters from registration lists. McInerney on Aug. 23 challenged 11 registrations. One was not canceled, with a hearing and cancelations done on Sept. 19.
Those removed were generally inactive voters who had moved out of town, Shane said, calling it “a cleanup of our system.”
“We don’t accept or handle code-based challenges within 70 days of the election,” Shane said.
Shane hadn’t responded to follow-up questions about whether the 10 voters taken off voting lists in September were improperly removed within the 70-day state window.
In eastern Iowa’s Muscatine County, Auditor Tibe Vander Linden said the county received 121 challenges in July and sent letters to those individuals notifying them their registrations were challenged.
Those voters had moved out of state, she said. Registrants who responded to the letter confirming they moved out of state were removed from the county’s voting lists. Others were marked inactive.
Vander Linden said two registrants whose cancelation forms were received and processed Aug. 29, after the state’s 70-day restricted window, had their registrations returned to inactive status. Communication from the secretary of state’s office prompted the county to reinstate those registrations.
Asked how the county would handle voters removed after the Aug. 7 federal window, Vander Linden said the county was instructed to follow the state’s 70-day rule and the secretary of state would have to weigh in.
Dallas County Elections Administrator Kim Owen and Polk County Auditor Jamie Fitzgerald said in emails this week that those counties had not seen mass voter registration challenges in the 70-day lead-up to the election.
(This story was updated to accurately reflect the most current information.)
Des Moines Register reporter Stephen Gruber-Miller contributed to this article
Marissa Payne covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. Reach her by email at [email protected]. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @marissajpayne
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