By Stephen Gruber-Miller, Des Moines Register
A group of naturalized citizens and the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa are suing Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate over his instruction to challenge the ballots of more than 2,000 voters who he said may be noncitizens.
Pate, a Republican, contacted Iowa’s 99 county auditors on Oct. 22 — two weeks before Election Day — telling them that his office had found more than 2,000 people on the state’s voter rolls who previously reported to the Iowa Department of Transportation that they were not citizens.
Pate instructed county auditors to challenge the ballots of those Iowans and instead require them to cast a provisional ballot.
The lawsuit says Pate’s instructions violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment by discriminating against voters based on their natural origin and their status as naturalized citizens.
The lawsuit argues the instructions also violate the Constitution’s right to vote, as protected by the First and 14th Amendments, as well as the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act.
“The secretary’s directive severely burdens the right to vote for affected voters, who will be forced to prove their citizenship — likely without advance knowledge that they will have to do so — in order to exercise their fundamental right to vote,” the lawsuit states. “These burdens go far beyond what is required of all other registered voters in Iowa, and what is required under state and federal law.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Iowa and the law firm Faegre Drinker filed the suit Wednesday night in federal court in the Southern District of Iowa in Des Moines.
Along with LULAC, the plaintiffs include four Iowa residents who are naturalized citizens — Orcun Selcuk, Alan David Gwilliam, Tingting Zhen and Michael Brokloff.
“It is shocking that the state’s highest official who is charged with protecting the voting rights of Iowa’s citizens is instead spearheading an effort to disenfranchise Iowa U.S. citizens,” Rita Bettis Austen, legal director for the ACLU of Iowa, said in a news conference Thursday. “He is fueling a false narrative about voter fraud by noncitizens and laying the groundwork to undermine confidence in the election.”
The plaintiffs are seeking a judgment from the court that Pate’s actions violate federal law and the U.S. Constitution. They are seeking to force Pate to rescind his guidance to county auditors requiring them to challenge voters included on the list and to restore anyone who may have been removed from Iowa’s voter rolls as a result of Pate’s audit.
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, a Republican, issued a statement Thursday criticizing the lawsuit.
“Iowa law guarantees that every eligible voter can vote and every legal vote will count,” Bird said in the statement. “But now, with only a few days until the election, and many Iowans already voting, LULAC is trying to derail our election integrity systems to let noncitizens illegally vote. Every noncitizen who illegally votes cancels out an Iowan’s valid vote. We won’t let that happen. I am fighting to defend our long-standing election integrity laws and ensure Iowans can maintain trust in our elections.”
It is a felony in Iowa for noncitizens to vote or to register to vote.
Experts say cases of noncitizen voting are rare. AÂ Brennan Center for Justice analysis of 42 voting jurisdictions from the 2016 election found that officials only referred 30 suspected cases of noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million cast.
Lawsuit says ‘outdated’ DOT data is sweeping up naturalized citizens
Pate’s list of potential noncitizens includes 2,022 people who previously reported to the Iowa Department of Transportation that they were not citizens and then subsequently registered to vote or cast a ballot.
Another 154 people told the Iowa DOT they were not citizens after they had already voted or registered to vote, Pate said. His office referred those 154 people to law enforcement for possible prosecution.
Pate identified the list of voters by cross-checking a database of self-reported noncitizens provided by the Iowa DOT with the state’s voter registration system.
The lawsuit says the DOT records go back years and that many of the voters on the list are naturalized citizens who got their driver’s licenses before naturalizing.
“The secretary’s claims about the eligibility of the affected voters to vote are based solely on purported self-reporting to the DOT of lawful permanent resident status that may be more than ten years old and long outdated,” the lawsuit states.
Pate has said he has tried unsuccessfully to get access to a federal database called SAVE, or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, which provides information on immigration status and whether someone is a naturalized citizen.
In a statement Thursday, Pate said he asked the Des Moines field office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to review the names on his list to determine whether they are citizens. Pate said the Des Moines field office completed the review but that the agency’s Washington, D.C. office prevented the information from being shared with him.
“If the federal government has information that will ensure only U.S. citizens vote AND ensure naturalized citizens can cast their ballot as normal, that information must be shared,” Pate said in the statement.
A spokesperson for USCIS did not immediately return a request for comment.
Plaintiffs describe confusing, time-consuming challenge process
The challenge process laid out in Iowa law allows any poll worker or registered voter to challenge a voter as unqualified if they are not a citizen, they are not old enough to vote or they do not meet Iowa’s other requirements to vote.
If a voter is challenged because they are suspected to be a noncitizen, they must provide proof of citizenship or else they will be required to cast a provisional ballot.
Provisional ballots are reviewed by the county’s Absentee and Special Voters Precinct Board, made up of poll workers, after the election is over. They are not counted unless the voter can provide proof of citizenship to the board by noon on Nov. 12.
The lawsuit says Pate’s directive “is far from such a well-designed, well-intended list effort to maintain Iowa’s voting rolls. It is an illegal, discriminatory, and error-ridden program that imposes unjustified, harmful burdens on the right of naturalized U.S. citizens to vote and will cause a chilling effect on the act of voting for countless eligible voters.”
Selcuck, one of the plaintiffs, is a political science professor at Luther College in Decorah and a native of Turkey who became a naturalized citizen in 2023.
Selcuk told reporters he voted early in October and then received a notice from the Winneshiek County auditor challenging his ballot and telling him he was not a U.S. citizen. Selcuk described the notice as confusing, saying it provided a deadline of Nov. 12 but didn’t specify what documents he needed in order to prove his citizenship or where he was supposed to go to do so.
“I’m concerned about other new, full citizens who took the time to go and vote the first time and now maybe they have to go back again and prove themselves once again,” he said. “Maybe they won’t have the time or the transportation. Or maybe they will be afraid to go to the auditor’s office. I’m concerned about their vote not being counted and about new citizens being intimidated from voting.”
Gwilliam, an Iowa City attorney and another plaintiff, said he moved from Wales to the United States in 1980 and was a lawful permanent resident for many years before becoming a citizen and registering to vote in August of this year.
Gwilliam said in 2023, when he was still a lawful permanent resident, he renewed his driver’s license, and that is the record that Pate has used to identify him as a potential noncitizen.
“Now of course I am a citizen,” he said. “However, because Secretary Pate is relying on old data I’m having to cast a provisional ballot and go through the time-consuming extra steps to exercise my new right to vote as a citizen. Those out-of-date DOT records are being used also to make voting more burdensome for other new citizens as well as me, and that’s very disturbing, too.”
Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Pate said he felt pressure to act on noncitizen voters and defended his decision to ask county auditors to challenge the voters’ ballots, saying Iowa’s approach is different than states like Virginia that have removed suspected noncitizens from their voter rolls.
“We have taken none of them off the voter registration list, so nobody has been disenfranchised from their opportunity to come in and vote,” he said. “What we’ve asked is we’ve asked for our poll workers to challenge a select number to make sure we can verify their citizenship status, but not stop them from voting.”
ACLU attorneys said Pate’s directive runs afoul of the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits any program to systematically remove ineligible voters from a state’s voter list within 90 days of the election.
“There’s a correct time and place for conducting list maintenance,” said Jonathan Topaz, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s voting rights project. “Less than two weeks before an election based on flawed data is not the correct time or manner for doing so under federal law.”
Pate’s initial instruction to county auditors was to challenge the ballots of anyone he identified as being a potential noncitizen and require them to cast a provisional ballot.
But Pate said Wednesday if a voter can prove their citizenship at the polls, or the county auditor has verified they are a citizen, they should be allowed to cast a regular ballot.
“The auditor has the latitude,” he said. “If they know the answer already, then there’s no point in challenging.”
Not telling voters they are on a list of potential noncitizens violates their due process rights, lawsuit argues
Pate said Wednesday his office has not reached out to the people on the list out of concern that doing so could create a sense of intimidation.
“We want to make sure that folks come experience their opportunity to vote and allow us to try to sort out those details,” he said.
But the lawsuit argues Pate’s decision not to reach out to voters to let them know that their citizenship is in question violates their due process rights.
“Because the list of affected voters is by design being kept secret, many of the affected voters are being denied any opportunity to contest their placement on the list — let alone a meaningful opportunity — thus placing their right to vote in the upcoming general election in severe jeopardy,” the lawsuit states.
In addition to Pate, the defendants in the lawsuit are Polk County Auditor Jamie Fitzgerald, Winneshiek County Auditor Ben Steines, Pottawattamie County Auditor Melvyn Houser, Johnson County Auditor Erin Shane and Scott County Auditor Kerri Tompkins.
Facebook Comments