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DES MOINES, Iowa (CN) — The League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa and four voters are suing Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate and five county auditors in federal court, claiming the secretary violated federal election law by directing county election officials to challenge or purge the voter registrations of more than 2,000 people who once identified as noncitizens.
Along with the citizen group, Orcun Selcuk, Alan David Gwilliam, Tingting Zhen and Michael Brokloff filed a suit late Wednesday night in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District in Des Moines, saying they became naturalized citizens after their names appeared in a Department of Transportation database Pate used to challenge their eligibility to vote.
Their move comes a day after the Supreme Court allowed Virginia to remove voters from that state’s rolls in a similar case.
The plaintiffs say Pate sent a memo to election officials Oct. 22 directing them to examine the names of 2,167 people on Iowa’s voter rolls who at some point identified as noncitizens. The voters say that action violated the federal National Voter Registration Act by challenging those people’s right to vote less than 90 days ahead of the federal election on Tuesday. They claim their constitutional right to vote and their rights of equal protection and due process were also violated.
The group says the move by Iowa’s secretary of state, who administers state and federal elections, is “an illegal, discriminatory, and error-ridden program that imposes unjustified, harmful burdens on the right of naturalized U.S. citizens to vote and will cause a chilling effect on the act of voting for countless eligible voters.”
Pate directed Iowa county election officials to challenge the right of people on his list who seek to vote. For their votes to be counted, they would have to cast “provisional ballots” and prove their citizenship after the election. Pate also told county officials to remove any noncitizens from the rolls after the election.
In the suit, they single out the experience of one plaintiff.
“Dr. Selcuk is one example: He registered to vote on Nov. 7, 2023, the day after he became a United States citizen after years of effort. Yet he was placed on the secretary’s covert list and wrongfully subjected to investigation and an election challenge for following the law and exercising his right to vote,” they say.
Lawyers in the Des Moines office of Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation in Des Moines and New York are representing the citizens group and voters.
At a news conference Thursday, ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis Austen said, “It is shocking that the state’s highest official charged with protecting the voting rights of Iowa citizens is spearheading an effort to disenfranchise Iowa citizens. He is fueling a false narrative about voter fraud by noncitizens and laying the groundwork to undermine confidence in the election.”
In response to the ACLU suit, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said in a statement released Thursday said the state is working to defend Iowans’ trust in elections.
“Iowa law guarantees that every eligible voter can vote and every legal vote will count,” Bird said. “But now, with only a few days until the election, and many Iowans already voting, LULAC is trying to derail our election integrity systems to let noncitizens illegally vote.”
Bird said a noncitizen who illegally votes cancels out a valid vote.
“We won’t let that happen. I am fighting to defend our long-standing election integrity laws and ensure Iowans can maintain trust in our elections,” she said.
The voters and the citizen group seek an emergency injunction against the effort to prevent them from casting regular ballots and ask the court to order Pate to rescind the voter registration directive and restore the status of anyone removed from the voting rolls.
The secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
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