Iowa’s top election official and a group of naturalized U.S. citizens settled a federal lawsuit on Wednesday that challenged how the state used citizenship-related data during the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. The agreement is designed to prevent Iowa from depending solely on driver’s license records to determine citizenship status in the final three months before an election, according to the terms described in court filings reported by the Associated Press.
The case began when several naturalized citizens sued Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate in late October 2024. They alleged that Pate infringed their rights to vote when election workers were directed to challenge ballots from about 2,000 registered voters who had been included on a list the state identified as possible noncitizens.
AP reported that the dispute focused on whether the challenged ballots belonged to citizens who were in fact eligible to vote. The state’s own later review, the reporting said, found that among more than 1.6 million Iowa voters who cast ballots in 2024, there were 35 people who were not U.S. citizens, and that 277 noncitizens were registered out of nearly 2.3 million voters. The AP story also noted that voting by people who are not U.S. citizens is illegal in federal elections, while stating there was no evidence that it occurs in large numbers.
According to the AP account, Pate’s office compiled its citizenship-related list by comparing Iowa voter rolls to a set of people who, at some point, had self-reported as noncitizens to the Iowa Department of Transportation. The reporting said the office sent the list to county election officials two weeks before the election, without trying to contact the voters directly, and that the office viewed the transportation data as the “best citizenship data source available” because it did not have access to federal immigration records under the Biden administration at the time.
The AP story said Iowa later moved to a federal verification approach through an agreement with President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Under that arrangement, Iowa can run searches for thousands of voters using names, birthdays and Social Security numbers through the federal government’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program—an approach operated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a part of DHS.
Pate had argued in court that the lawsuit should be dismissed as moot, citing the rescission of the 2024 voter list. The settlement terms described by AP also say that the rescinded list cannot be used for any future ballot-related challenges or efforts to maintain voter lists.
In exchange for those limits, the naturalized citizens agreed to dismiss their claims. The settlement, AP reported, was signed by both parties and filed in federal court on Wednesday, but it had not yet been accepted by a federal judge.
Rita Bettis Austen, legal director of the ACLU of Iowa, called the settlement a win. In a statement carried by AP, she said, “The overwhelming majority of voters wrongly put on this list, including all our clients, are naturalized United States citizens who have the right to vote,” and added, “We are hopeful today’s settlement will safeguard Iowans from this happening again in future elections.”
Pate and Iowa’s Republican Attorney General Brenna Bird also described the outcome as a victory, AP said, including because the state will now use federal databases to verify voter rolls. The AP story said that in a review conducted last year, Pate’s office used SAVE as well, underscoring how the lawsuit’s settlement fits into a broader debate over how states should verify eligibility close to election day.