Official: 87 noncitizens illegally voted in recent Iowa elections

DES MOINES — At least 87 Iowans without U.S. citizenship illegally voted in recent elections, the state’s top elections official said Tuesday.

Another 67 people violated state elections laws by registering to vote despite not being a U.S. citizen, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate said.

Both actions are Class D felonies, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $750 to $7,500.

The Republican secretary of state said his office is working with the Iowa Department of Transportation to refer those 154 names to the Iowa Department of Public Safety for further investigation and potential referral to the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, which has exclusive jurisdiction over state elections crimes.

Meantime, the citizenship status of another 2,022 Iowans at the time they voted or registered remains unclear, Pate said. Those individuals indicated to the state they are not U.S. citizens and later registered or voted in an election, Pate said. It is unknown whether they became U.S. citizens before registering or voting.

Pate’s office has flagged those 2,022 voting records and ordered local elections officials to challenge their ballots if they vote during the current election. Those individuals will be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, Pate said, and his office will then determine whether the individual is a legal U.S. citizen. If they are, their ballot will be counted in the election results; if they are not, they will have violated state elections law.

All of the individuals involved are legal U.S. residents but without full U.S. citizenship, Pate said. None of the individuals involved live in the country illegally, he said.

Pate said regarding those 2,022 Iowans whose citizenship is unclear, he tried to balance what he said are his duties to encourage participation in Iowa’s elections with ensuring election integrity.

Pate said he did not want to send a warning letter to voters because he did not want to do something that might scare an eligible Iowan from voting. However, he said he also wanted to err on the side of caution to avoid ballots cast by those who are ineligible.

“That’s the tightrope we walk. As I said, my two roles, I encourage voting and giving you accessibility, but I have to also maintain the integrity,” Pate said. “So the approach we took is they’ll come and vote … but we’re going to kind of lean to the side of being a little more cautious, and we will ask them to be voting provisional so that we can ascertain, are you a citizen now, because your driver’s license says you’re not, so which is right?”

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Pate said the 154 illegal votes and registrations, as well as the 2,022 unclear cases, were discovered during a review of 2.3 million Iowa voter records. The violations were discovered after a cross-check with Iowa DOT records, Pate said. Most commonly, the voter registration and voting data would coincide with individuals who indicated on their driver’s license or other Iowa DOT documents that they are not U.S. citizens.

Pate said the infractions were discovered that way because federal law prevents elections officials from asking individuals when they register whether they are legal U.S. citizens. But that citizenship question can be asked by the state transportation department, he said.

“In this time and age it is so important, and with social media putting a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there, I wanted to have the facts,” Pate said. “And here are the facts: 2.3 million voters, we identified 154 folks who are noncitizens who self-reported that they shouldn’t be voting and shouldn’t be registered, and we have an additional 2,000 or so that we want to get more information on. That’s the facts.”

The 87 illegally cast votes were made in previous elections, Pate said. None were cast in the current presidential election, for which early voting began Oct. 16.

Linn County Auditor Joel Miller, who unsuccessfully ran in 2022 to unseat Pate, questioned the timing of the announcement — two weeks from an election in which immigration will play a key role — and said the state should spearhead enforcement, rather than leaving it to volunteer poll workers.

"He already knows that a potential crime has been committed, so what's he doing? He's allowing them to potentially commit another election crime if they show up to vote," Miller said. "This is twisted, political theater."

Miller said he could be fined thousands of dollars if Pate determines his workers did not adequately comply with the order.

The cases are spread throughout “several” counties, Pate said, with more occurring in the state’s more populous counties like Polk, Linn, Johnson and Black Hawk, Pate said.

He said of the state’s 1,700 precincts, the cases appear in roughly 700 — and of those, roughly 300 precincts had just one case.

Comments: (515) 355-1300, erin.murphy@thegazette.com

Jared Strong of The Gazette contributed to this report.

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