Iowa is suing the Biden administration over its alleged refusal to provide access to the citizenship status information of more than 2,000 registered voters whose status was questioned ahead of the 2024 election.
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird and Secretary of State Paul Pate filed the lawsuit on Tuesday, which claims U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) “would not hand over” its “list of noncitizens illegally registered to vote in Iowa.”
Federal authorities’ “failure meant that the State had to rely on the best — imperfect — data it had available to ensure that no Iowan’s vote was canceled by an illegal, noncitizen vote,” Pate and Bird said in a joint statement.
Along with USCIS, the lawsuit names the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as defendants.
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Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, pictured above, and Attorney General Brenna Bird sued the Biden administration on Tuesday for access to information on the citizenship status of more than 2,000 registered voters. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
Fox News Digital reached out to DHS for comment but did not immediately hear back.
The complaint details how state election officials checked voter rolls against a list of people who identified themselves as noncitizens with the state’s Department of Transportation. The vast majority of the 2,176 names had subsequently registered to vote or voted, meaning that some of those people could have become naturalized citizens in the lapsed time.
Pate and Bird said the government‘s refusal to hand over the information forced the state to rely on “imperfect” data from its Department of Transportation. (iStock)
Pate told county elections officials during the state’s early voting to challenge the ballots cast by any of the individuals named on the list and have them cast a provisional ballot instead.
Pro-voting groups sued Pate over the move, though days later a judge ruled against them and allowed those named on Pate’s list to cast provisional ballots.
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At least 500 of the identified individuals proved their citizenship status and had their votes counted, the Des Moines Register reported, citing preliminary information collected from 97 of the state’s 99 counties.
Another 74 ballots were rejected, according to the Register, mostly because those people did not return to prove their citizenship status.
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Most of the people on Pate’s list did not vote in the 2024 election, according to the Register’s data from county auditors.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
