Iowa AG supports Virginia's legal fight to remove 1,600 potential non-citizens from voter rolls • Iowa Capital Dispatch

Iowa's Republican attorney general is among officials in 26 states who have signed a legal order asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in a dispute over Virginia's attempt to remove 1,600 people from the voter rolls without proving that each of these people does not have citizenship and is not entitled to vote.

The U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of plaintiffs filed a lawsuit to prevent Virginia's Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin from issuing an executive order purging the state's registration list of people suspected of not being U.S. citizens. The Youngkin administration relied on motor vehicle records to identify the targets, but the plaintiffs presented evidence that some of the people removed from Virginia's voter rolls were citizens.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court judge's order to restore the 1,600 registrations, saying Youngkin must deal with suspected non-citizens on the state's voter rolls through an individual removal process rather than relying on systematic downloads of motor vehicle records.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird signed the brief in support of Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares' request for immediate action by the U.S. Supreme Court. About two dozen Republican attorneys general have signed the amicus brief.

“Federal and state law are clear: only citizens can vote.” Bird explained in a press release. “But instead of following the law and working with states to promote election integrity, the Biden-Harris Justice Department has been an obstacle. We must ensure the integrity of the elections.”

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, announced Oct. 22 that an audit of Iowa voter rolls found 87 people who voted in an election and later identified themselves to the Department of Transportation as noncitizens. Another 67 people identified as non-citizens registered to vote but did not cast ballots, Pate said.

According to the Iowa Secretary of State, 87 non-citizens voted in the election

In the Virginia case, the Republican attorney general's brief said federal court decisions that temporarily halted the removal of presumed non-citizens from the voter rolls before the Nov. 5 election undermined Virginia's authority to decide voter qualification issues. The letter claimed that there might be fewer political divisions in the United States if the federal government avoided “last-minute attacks on state efforts to monitor voter qualifications.”

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who has been embroiled in numerous immigration-related lawsuits, presided over the proceedings.

“It has always been against the law for non-citizens to vote,” Kobach said. “Every non-citizen vote effectively cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen. It is incomprehensible that Democrats and activist judges are fighting to keep her in office.”

The attorneys general of Iowa and Kansas join the order Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia , and Wyoming.

David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said claims about widespread non-citizen voting are false.

“When states look for non-citizens in their lists, they find that there are almost none,” Becker said. “States already have the tools they need to find and prevent these very rare cases.”

He said Ohio officials analyzing the state's 8 million registered voters found six suspected cases in which non-citizens voted in the past decade. That would be a potential fraud rate of 0.00002%, or something equivalent to the chance of being struck by lightning in Ohio, Becker said.

“If both parties worked together after this election to find ways to make it easier to register citizens while ensuring that even the very rare case of non-citizens registering no longer occurs, that would be a good thing,” Becker said . “But these false claims about widespread non-citizen voting should not be used to justify dramatic new measures that would have no meaningful impact on election integrity.”