Iowa sues Biden admin­is­tra­tion to ver­i­fy sta­tus of 2,000 reg­is­tered vot­ers who may be nonci­t­i­zens

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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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 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.

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.