Pate running for another term as Iowa’s top elections official

DES MOINES — Saying there is more work to be done to ensure the proper counting of Iowans’ ballots and to encourage more people to vote, Paul Pate on Saturday announced he will run for re-election as the state’s top elections official.

Pate, a Republican, will be running for a fifth, four-year term as Iowa’s Secretary of State. Pate has held the office for the past three terms, since 2015; he previously held it for one term, from 1995 to 1999.

Pate, who is 67, also is a former state senator and Cedar Rapids mayor.

“I’m very proud of the fact that because of the tireless work we’ve done in running elections in Iowa, we’ve got a gold standard for safe, secure and fair elections,” Pate said in an interview. “But it’s because we’ve done a layered approach to election security and election integrity, and it’s evolved as time has gone on by just kind of mitigating the new risks.

“And that’s why I’m running again, because we haven’t finished the work. We’re well on track, but we still have more to do. And Iowans take elections and voting pretty seriously, and I’m proud to serve them and represent them.”

Davenport U.S. Navy veteran and Democrat Ryan Peterman also is running for Iowa Secretary of State.

Pate said he wants to continue working on ways to protect Iowa’s elections and encourage more people to vote. He highlighted Iowa voter turnout and registration records, navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, and implementing the state’s voter ID requirement starting with the 2018 elections.

He said the office must continue to address what he called misinformation and disinformation in elections. Pate said his goal is to ensure Iowans are confident in their election results regardless of the political outcome.

“I don’t want to sound overly dramatic here, but if Iowans don’t believe that the (election) results are legitimate, that ‘That is my governor,’ or ‘That is my president,’ or ‘That is my state legislator,’ our republic has fallen and no one fired a single bullet,” Pate said. “And that’s what we were dangerously close to with a lot of the misinformation and disinformation that has been going out there for some time.

“And foreign nations — bad actors — have been manipulating a lot of that messaging. So I’ve had to put a lot more effort into cybersecurity and ways to mitigate those evolving risks.”

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Pate also said he wants to continue to work with Iowa’s county auditors — the locally elected officials who conduct elections. He described this as a somewhat transitional time for county auditors across the state: roughly a third are new and roughly another third are in their first or second term.

“I’ve had to really tune up and double down — in fact, I’d say triple down — on our training outreach for the auditors and for these poll workers,” Pate said. “That’s a big part of what effort we’ve put into on the election side.”

Pate faced criticism over 2024 voter list

During the 2024 elections, some voters’ rights advocate groups criticized Pate for his effort to prevent Iowans without U.S. citizenship from voting illegally.

Shortly before the November election, Pate distributed to local elections officials a list of more than 2,000 names of Iowans whose citizenship his office was unable to confirm. He instructed local officials to have poll workers challenge the ballots of any individual on the list who attempted to vote. They were to cast provisional ballots, after which they would have a week to provide documentation of their citizenship.

Pate had sought a list of Iowans without full U.S. citizenship from the federal government, but the government declined to share the list. So Pate created his own list using state transportation department information, which by Pate’s admission could have included outdated information.

The federal government has since shared the information with Pate’s office, and the state was able to determine that 35 individuals without full U.S. citizenship voted illegally in 2026 out of a total of nearly 1.7 million ballots.

“The last thing I wanted to do was create a scarlet letter approach where we were painting a scarlet letter on these folks who, many of them were citizens at this point. We knew some of them were going to be. But we also needed to ask the question. So that’s why we took the softer approach,” Pate said.

“But it was the only real option we had at the time. Moving forward, I think we’ve got a much better tool in place because now we have access to this list that we wanted originally, plus we have gotten authority from the (Iowa) Legislature to be able to partner with more agencies,” Pate said. “We’re doing it up front so we’re not disenfranchising anybody, and we’re hopefully making it much more user friendly.

“That’s what we learned from this, and that’s where we’re going with it. And I think it’s a big step in the right direction.”

The primary election is on June 2, 2026, and the general election on Nov. 3, 2026.

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

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