Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com.
The State of Iowa unfairly targeted hundreds of potential voters during last year’s election, and it released more evidence to prove it.
Two weeks before the 2024 election, Secretary of State Paul Pate ordered local election officials to challenge the votes of about 2,200 people who were placed on a secret list. At some point in the past, those people had told the Iowa Department of Transportation they were noncitizens. But they were now registered to vote, and the state was worried they might not be eligible.
At the time, there was clear evidence Pate was using flawed data. The DOT database is a notoriously unreliable tool for finding noncitizen voters, which we already knew was a rare occurrence, anyway. But in the heat of a contentious election and shortly after a conversation with Governor Kim Reynolds, Pate used the power of his office to target hundreds of potential Iowa voters.
On March 20, Pate admitted that only 277 of the 2,176 people on his list were confirmed to be noncitizens.
That’s nearly 13 percent. Or roughly 1 out of 8 registered voters flagged for extra scrutiny. Predictably, he did not apologize to the other 87 percent. (Those 277 people, by the way, represent roughly 0.01 percent of all registered voters in the state of Iowa. And according to the Des Moines Register, the “vast majority” of those 277 didn’t try to vote or even register to vote in 2024.)
Still, Pate told local election officials last October they were to stop nearly 2,200 people from voting like everybody else. Instead, local auditors’ offices were told to require them to cast provisional ballots. That meant to get their vote counted, unfairly targeted citizens would have to prove later on that they were citizens—if they chose to go to the extra effort.
Naturally, voters were intimidated. That was entirely predictable. Numerous studies have shown that when hurdles are put in front of people during elections, those who are targeted tend not to vote as often as others.
What’s more, this voter suppression scheme was aimed at finding phantoms—the rare noncitizen who votes in Iowa.
Pate announced on March 20 that his office had found 35 noncitizens who voted in the 2024 election.
If this number is accurate, it’s a barely noticeable sliver of the more than 1.67 million Iowans who cast ballots last fall.
What this means essentially is that, in the entire City of Davenport, there was perhaps one noncitizen who voted. Add in Bettendorf, Blue Grass, Buffalo, Eldridge, Long Grove, Walcott, LeClaire, Princeton, Riverdale, McCausland, Donahue, Dixon, New Liberty and the rest of Scott County—along with Dewitt, Dewitt Township and half of Camanche in Clinton County—and there was one other.
At this point, columnists like me are supposed say, it’s wrong for anybody to vote illegally. And that is true. But I’m just as worried, if not more so, about the 1,900 potential voters who at the last minute were recklessly put on Paul Pate’s secret list for unfair treatment.
How many of these people said, “it’s not worth the effort to vote if I have to go to the trouble to find my papers and then go back to the auditor’s office? I’m a citizen, why go through the hassle when others don’t have to?”
How many who might not understand English well said, “I don’t know what this means, but I’m not going to bother, either.”
How many who came here from repressive countries said, “this sounds all too familiar. I’m staying home.”
I worry about those people.
Is anybody running state government in Iowa concerned about them? It doesn’t look like it.
I know many people will shrug at the idea that somebody they don’t know has to go to additional effort to get their ballot counted. But, of course, these are the same people who will never be asked to shoulder this additional burden. They have the luxury of knowing they will never have to confront this kind of discrimination at the ballot box.
Republicans have conditioned Iowans for years to be frightened of the thought that even one immigrant might illegally cast a ballot. For every illegal vote cast, a legal one is invalidated, they say. But they don’t care about the people who are intimidated into not voting because of the reckless use of state power. Never do they consider how many votes are denied because of such abuses by the government.
Pate said last month that his office used the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to confirm his figures. But why did he wait so long to try to check this database? He blamed the Biden administration last year for his failure to get access to this tool, but other states, like Virginia, had the foresight to act months earlier.
Other states even gained access to the SAVE database years ago.
Why didn’t Iowa move earlier, too? Why did Iowa wait until almost the last minute to embark on this process?
Why did Pate issue such an aggressive order only to partially back off before a federal judge heard a challenge to the order—but after many of the people on his list had been unfairly targeted? After some already had surely been dissuaded from exercising their right to vote.
The politicians who run this state like to complain about government overreach, but they will ignore these questions. And Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird confirmed that Iowa law enforcement will investigate the cases Pate identified.
But what will the rest of us do?
I have a suggestion: Perhaps Iowans who believe government ought to treat all people fairly should ask themselves how many of their fellow citizens were discouraged from voting last year by a reckless and overzealous state?
We’ve heard for years about the relative few who vote illegally. But many Iowans rarely, if ever, consider how many people lose their vote through the government’s aggressive abuse of power. I don’t know what that number might be, but do you suppose it’s greater than 35?