The state of Iowa is suing President Joe Biden’s administration for blocking efforts to verify the status of 2,000 suspected non-citizens who are registered to vote.
The Biden admin is refusing to provide access to the citizenship status information of more than 2,000 registered voters.
The status of the voters was questioned ahead of the 2024 election.
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird and Secretary of State Paul Pate filed the lawsuit on Tuesday.
According to the filing, Biden’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) “would not hand over” its “list of non-citizens illegally registered to vote in Iowa.”
In a joint statement, Pate and Bird said:
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, non-citizen vote.”
Along with USCIS, the lawsuit names the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as defendants.
DHS has yet to issue a statement regarding the lawsuit.
The complaint details how state election officials checked voter rolls against a list of people who identified themselves as non-citizens with the state’s Department of Transportation.
The vast majority of the 2,176 names had subsequently registered to vote or voted.
It’s possible that some of those people could have become naturalized citizens in the lapsed time.
However, officials have been unable to verify their status without information from the USCIS.
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.
Those on the list could have cast a provisional ballot instead, Pate noted.
Pro-voting groups sued Pate over the move, however.
Days later, a judge ruled against them and allowed those named on Pate’s list to cast provisional ballots.
At least 500 of the identified individuals proved their citizenship status and had their votes counted, the Des Moines Register reported.
The outlet cited preliminary information collected from 97 of the state’s 99 counties.
Another 74 ballots were rejected, according to the Register.
They were mostly rejected because those people did not return to prove their citizenship status.
According to the Register’s data from county auditors, most of the people on Pate’s list did not vote in the 2024 election.
