By William Morris, Des Moines Register
Iowa election documents will remain English-only after the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a Hispanic advocacy group lacked standing to challenge a prior court order.
Under a 2002 law, all official political documents in Iowa must be in English unless “necessary to secure the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.”
In 2008, responding to a lawsuit by then-U.S. Rep. Steve King, a district court found that the law applies to election materials such as ballots, voter registration forms and absentee ballot applications, and entered a permanent injunction barring the state from offering them in any language except English.
In 2021, the League of Latin American Citizens sued Secretary of State Paul Pate, seeking to overturn that ruling. A district court agreed and, in 2023, dissolved the injunction and allowed state and county officials to begin providing voting materials in other languages.
Pate’s office appealed, seeking to keep the injunction in place, and on May 9, the Supreme Court agreed, ruling that LULAC, which was not a party in the 2008 case, lacked standing to challenge the now-17-year-old injunction.
LULAC not injured, so can’t sue, court rules
Justice Christopher McDonald wrote for all five participating justices that LULAC lacked legal grounds to sue. LULAC had argued the state’s interpretation of the law hampered its voter registration efforts and forced it to spend additional money and resources, but did not claim “associational standing” to address alleged injury to its members.
That’s not enough, the court ruled.
“A litigant’s general interest in the proper interpretation and enforcement of the law is not a cognizable injury sufficient to support standing to sue,” McDonald wrote.
And while the ban on translated documents might result in expense and inconvenience for LULAC, McDonald noted the law didn’t actually require or forbid LULAC to do anything, and that an organization “’cannot spend its way into standing simply by expending money’ in response to the challenged law.”
In doing so, he quoted a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court case, in which the court ruled a group of conservative doctors lacked legal standing to challenge the FDA’s approval of a common abortion medication.
“An organization’s expenditure of resources in response to a law that does not violate, regulate or determine the litigant’s rights, status, or legal relations is not a legally cognizable injury,” McDonald wrote.
Pate: ruling affirms fair, secure election efforts
In a statement, Pate said the decision “provides important clarity for our office and election officials across the state, ensuring that we can continue to administer elections with consistency, transparency, integrity, and respect for the rule of law.”
Pate also said that his office continues to follow the federal Voting Rights Act, including by “providing translated versions of official government documents and forms in communities where the population thresholds have been met.”
In its 2021 complaint, LULAC alleged that Pate’s office provides Spanish-language documents only in Buena Vista County, due to its large Spanish-speaking population, but Spanish speakers elsewhere in the state, or speakers of any language other than English or Spanish, cannot access voting documents in their native tongue.
Attorney General Brenna Bird, whose office opposed LULAC’s lawsuit, praised the ruling.
“Under the law, all official documents, including voter registration forms, are written in English. The case against the Iowa Secretary of State’s office jeopardized election integrity,” she said in a statement. “Thanks to today’s decision, we will continue to follow all federal and state laws for elections.”
LULAC is represented by the Elias Group, a national law firm focused on voting rights litigation. Attorneys there did not immediately return messages seeking comment on the ruling and Pate’s statement, or whether they see any other avenues to challenge the 2008 injunction.
Court also rules on qualified immunity, anonymous filings
In a separate case Friday, involving a lawsuit accusing Western Dubuque Community Schools of failing to prevent injury to a student, the court made two notable rulings.
The district court had dismissed the case in part for failure to comply with the requirements of Iowa’s qualified immunity law.
But the unanimous court found that qualified immunity only applies in cases of constitutional or statutory rights, and not pure common-law tort claims, such as negligence. In doing so, it partially overruled a decision from two years ago, in which it found that the law’s pleading requirements could apply in a case, even if the substantive immunity did not.
The Supreme Court also addressed, for the first time, whether and when courts can permit anonymous “Jane/John Doe” litigation. While many district courts have permitted anonymous filings in some instances, often involving victims of sexual assault, there was no clear rule authorizing the practice.
The court found that, following the guidance of many federal courts, “pseudonymous petitions are generallydisfavored but that there may be some circumstances in which they are allowed,” with courts to consider factors such as the potential for retaliation or prosecution and whether identification would reveal highly sensitive personal information, against the public’s right to transparency and potential unfairness to defendants.
In this case, the court found, the child’s parents have not shown any need for anonymity, and so they remanded the case to continue, but with the parents’ true names attached.
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