Iowa bill would require counties to use SAVE to verify citizenship when registering voters

DES MOINES — County election officials would be required to confirm Iowans’ citizenship using a federal immigration database to register them to vote under a bill advanced by Iowa Senate lawmakers on Wednesday.

The legislation comes as Iowa lawmakers in recent years have enacted more voter requirements and guidelines for poll workers and election officials, including a law passed in 2025 allowing poll workers to challenge a voter at the polls on the basis of their citizenship status.

Currently, voters have to attest that they are U.S. citizens when registering to vote.

Senate Study Bill 3045, advanced by a three-member Iowa Senate subcommittee, would require county registrars to verify the U.S. citizenship of Iowans registering to vote using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, which is administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

But the Iowa Secretary of State is already developing a similar system to vet the citizenship of voters across the state, according to the office’s representative Eric Gookin.

“We already think the existing authorities allow us to do this,” Gookin told lawmakers during the subcommittee meeting. “We've been moving in this general direction … since last July, when we got expanded access to use outside data from the federal government from other trusted vendors.”

States, including Iowa, were granted access to federal immigration information for determining citizenship status after a lawsuit brought in December 2024 by Iowa against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under then-President Joe Biden.

A law signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds in 2025 also allows the Iowa Secretary of State to use state and federal documentation to determine the U.S. citizenship status of Iowans on the state’s voter registration list and create a new voter registration status of “unconfirmed” for individuals whose citizenship the state cannot verify.

Gookin said the Iowa Secretary of State's Office is working on rolling out its verification system in the coming months. He said he was unsure how the Senate bill would interact with it and attended the subcommittee meeting to learn more about it.

Doug Struyk, representing the Iowa State Association of County Auditors, questioned the mechanics of how the bill would work, including with same-day voter registration.

He noted a citizenship verification requirement during same-day voter registration could cause delays and long lines at polls, including for those casting provisional ballots.

In 2022, Scott County had 815 Election Day voter registrations. In 2024, the county had 2,800 same-day voter registrations on Election Day, according to Struyk.

“In looking at this and figuring out how to implement it, we don't want to have it in such a way that we create lines and delays for people to vote,” Struyk said, adding that counties currently don’t have access to SAVE.

Democratic state Sen. Cindy Winckler, of Davenport, expressed concerns about the logistics of the legislation, including a provision that would require those challenging decisions by the registrar that bar them from registering based on their status in the federal immigration database to appeal the decision in district court.

“It is very important that all voters who are eligible to vote should be able to vote. And I'm concerned that there will be a negative impact in regard to this in just the logistics of how this all works,” Winckler said.

Republican state Sen. Scott Webster, of Bettendorf, signed on to advance the legislation, highlighting the importance of placing safeguards on the election system, but said he would like to see added language about provisional ballots.

“I think everybody at least agrees at this table that you should be a legal citizen to vote in our elections,” Webster said. “This particular bill, I think, is headed in the right direction, to try to give us some sort of background to check. I think that obviously there's some things that came out of the subcommittee that might need a little tweaking.”

Webster and Iowa state Sen. Ken Rozenboom, a Republican from Pella who is sponsoring the bill, advanced the bill to committee. Winckler declined to do so.

Gazette Des Moines Bureau Chief Erin Murphy contributed to this report.