US District Judge Stephen Locker ruled Sunday that Iowa can continue to challenge the validity of hundreds of ballots after Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate sent a letter to county commissioners on October 22 stating that a review of voter registration data showed 2,176 registrants might be ineligible to vote due to non-citizenship. Secretary Pate directed county commissioners to inform election officials that ballots cast by registrants on a list of suspected noncitizens must be challenged.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), on behalf of four naturalized US citizens on the list, filed suit, seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction declaring that Secretary Pate’s actions violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court denied this motion on the following grounds:

1. The letter does not remove anyone from the voter rolls but rather requires flagged voters to use provisional ballots;
2. The court must be cautious about granting last-minute injunctive relief in election issues;
3. Secretary Pate is no longer requiring voters on the list to file provisional ballots after their citizenship has been proven;
4. The 2,176 names on the list represent a small fraction of Iowa’s nearly 79,000 naturalized citizens; and
5. It is uncontested that some of the individuals on the list were registered voters who were not US citizens.

Judge Lochner, who was appointed during the Biden administration, expressed concern that granting an injunction would effectively allow ineligible voters to cast ballots. Disappointed with the ruling, ACLU of Iowa legal director Rita Bettis Austen stated:

We are obviously disappointed with the court’s decision not to outright block Secretary Pate’s directive, which we still fear threatens to disenfranchise eligible voters simply because they are people who became citizens in the past several years. Even the Secretary agrees that the vast majority of voters on his list are United States citizens.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, on the other hand, was pleased with the ruling:

A U.S. district judge just denied an attempt to block IowaSOS challenge of non-citizen registered voters – a win for election integrity! We encourage all citizens to vote, and we will enforce the law to ensure those votes aren’t cancelled out by illegal votes from non-citizens.