Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) signed a bill into law enabling Iowa poll workers to challenge voters’ citizenship.
This week, Reynolds announced she had given the final approval to House File 954, also banning ranked choice voting in Iowa, making it more difficult for third-party groups such as Libertarians to qualify as major political parties.
The law, which makes Iowa the latest state to embrace election reforms, allows election workers to add citizenship to the list of factors they are permitted to challenge voters on, starting July 1. The list was previously limited to questions about age and residency. If poll workers are not satisfied with the supporting documents, a voter would only be allowed to cast a provisional ballot until their citizenship is confirmed by state or federal records.
The new law also grants Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate the authority to coordinate with state and federal agencies to check voters’ records to determine the citizenship status of Iowans on the state’s voter registration list. It also requires the Iowa Department of Transportation to send Pate’s office a list of people 17 and older who have submitted documentation to the DOT confirming they are not citizens. The law would also create an “unconfirmed” voter registration status for individuals whose citizenship the state cannot verify.
Pate praised the legislation as a tool to “add additional layers of integrity to our robust election procedures.”
“Keeping Iowa elections safe, fair, and accurate is a team effort, from the Iowa Legislature and Governor Reynolds to our county auditors and local election officials on the frontlines of our elections,” Pate said in a statement. “Today, we saw a clear consensus that upholding consistent, statewide procedures and ensuring voter eligibility are key to balancing participation by all eligible Iowans with election integrity.”
Democrats and civil rights advocates argued that the law amounts to voter intimidation.
“We are very concerned to see this bill signed into law,” Rita Bettis Austen, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, said in a statement. “The Iowa Legislature should have focused on making sure that the Secretary of State was reined in after the illegal debacle we saw take place in the days leading up to the 2024 election using IDOT data. We know that effort was a harmful failure, sweeping in thousands of fully qualified U.S. citizen voters in Iowa. But instead, this law reads like a recipe for more racial profiling, discrimination, and voter intimidation impacting qualified voters.”
Republicans argue that these measures are necessary to protect the integrity of every vote.
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“Just one illegal vote is an attack on all of our votes,” Republican state Rep. Austin Harris said during a debate on the bill. “As Americans, we have a right to self-determination through our elections. And when we turn a blind eye and we let people who have not earned the right to vote to do that, that threatens all of our abilities to self-determination.”
Pace, in particular, expressed concern last year when he said he had compiled a list of over 2,000 voters whose citizenship the secretary of state’s office could not confirm. As the 2024 elections took place, he instructed poll workers to challenge ballots cast by any voters on the list, instructing such Iowans to cast a provisional ballot instead, which would be counted if they provided proof of citizenship. In March, Pace announced that following an investigation, only 35 out of 1.7 million ballots cast during the election were from noncitizens.