Iowa Settles Voter List Dispute After Securing Access to Federal Database

Both sides have claimed victory after the state of Iowa agreed to settle a federal lawsuit brought by naturalized citizens who were flagged for potential voter fraud ahead of the 2024 election.

Under the Feb. 11 settlement, the state will retire a list of more than 2,000 registered voters who had at some point told the Iowa Department of Transportation that they were noncitizens when applying for a driver’s license.

In late October 2024—about two weeks before Election Day—Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate directed county auditors to compare that list against the state’s voter rolls as part of an effort to prevent noncitizens from illegally voting. Pate said at the time that his state’s Department of Transportation data provided the best citizenship information available because his office did not have access to federal immigration records under the Biden administration.

The move was challenged in court by five voters backed by the Iowa chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The plaintiffs, all naturalized U.S. citizens, argued that the use of the list unlawfully burdened their right to vote by subjecting eligible voters to additional scrutiny and potential challenges.

Pate’s office later determined that 277 of the 2,176 people on the list were not eligible to vote, and 35 of the noneligible persons had cast ballots in the 2024 election.

The lawsuit proceeded while Iowa pursued its own case against the Biden administration, seeking access to a federal immigration database to verify voter eligibility. That dispute has since been resolved after the second Trump administration granted Iowa access to the federal government’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, allowing the state to cross-reference voters using names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers to check whether they are U.S. citizens or if they have died.

With access to SAVE, state officials said they no longer needed the 2024 Iowa Department of Transportation-based list, clearing the way for a settlement with the voters.

As part of the Feb. 11 agreement, Iowa will formally rescind the list and will not rely exclusively on driver’s license records to create any voter-challenge list during the three months before an election. The settlement still requires final approval by a federal judge.

State officials and voting-rights advocates each cast the outcome as a win.

Pate and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, who led the push to secure SAVE access, said the agreement allows the state to move away from the disputed 2024 list while strengthening its capability to prevent unlawful voting.

“Our goal has always been to verify citizenship proactively—at the point of registration rather than at the time of voting, and with access to SAVE and new legislative solutions, we have the tools to do so,” Pate said in a statement.

“This victory underscores the importance of our agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that will help Iowa safeguard the integrity of our elections for years to come by making sure an illegal vote does not cancel out the legal vote of Iowa citizens,” Bird said.

The ACLU, meanwhile, described the settlement as a protection for lawful voters who were wrongly swept up in the screening effort.

“We are very pleased to be able to settle this case favorably for Iowa voters,” Rita Bettis Austen, legal director of ACLU of Iowa, said in a statement. “Iowans deserve elections free from this sort of unjustified, intimidating effort by our highest state officials that targeted fully qualified voters in a discriminatory and unreliable fashion, undermining both voting rights and people’s confidence in elections.”

The SAVE system has existed for decades and is currently maintained by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The database received a major upgrade under a data-sharing agreement reached in May 2025 between DHS and the Social Security Administration (SSA), which created a combined dataset of SSA information along with immigration records. The upgrade makes it easier for states such as Iowa to use the tool to check the status of registered voters, because SAVE now aligns more closely with the information that most states already have or can access for most voters.