Iowa's 'suspicious' voters

Is the state violating the rights of some to comfort others?

Photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash

What makes somebody a suspect?

I ask this question because it goes to the heart of the controversy over the 2,022 potential Iowa voters who will be treated differently than others if they try to cast ballots in this year’s election.

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, has identified 2,022 people who declared to the Iowa Department of Transportation at one time that they were not citizens and then later registered to vote or voted. Pate’s office freely acknowledges some of these 2,022 people may have become citizens before they registered or voted. Nevertheless, he is telling county election officials they must require all of these people to cast a provisional ballot.

In order to have their ballot counted, these voters must later show a special elections board proof of eligibility.

On the surface, it makes sense to challenge voters who may not be eligible. Iowa law says it is the “duty” of election workers to challenge voters who it “knows or suspects” are not eligible.

But is it really fair to throw the blanket of suspicion over each of these 2,022 people?

Consider this: According to a 2012 Cedar Rapids Gazette article, Matt Schultz, then Iowa’s secretary of state, said that a search of driver’s license records showed that 3,582 foreign nationals had registered to vote in Iowa since 2008 and 1,200 voted in the 2010 general election.

Schultz, a Republican, acknowledged they did not know how many became citizens after getting a license or state ID from the DOT.

Two years later, in 2014, Schultz’s office issued a report that said 147 “non-citizen cases” were investigated, and 70 were, in fact, citizens when they registered and cast votes, according to a Des Moines Register article at the time.

The office determined the other 77 cases were “actionable” and referred them to county attorneys. At the time of the article, charges were filed in only 10 of those cases.

Perhaps the other cases weren’t a priority, or maybe prosecutors didn’t find them “actionable” at all.

Either way, this string of events demonstrates that despite questions being publicly raised about thousands of people, only a fraction was sufficient to make it to court.

This is in a state where officials in power have been aggressively searching for non-citizen voters for years.

This is not surprising.

If you look at the Heritage Foundation’s database of “voter fraud,” cases across the United States, there are only four foreign citizens who were proved to have illegally voted or registered to vote in Iowa going back to 2011. In the meantime, millions of Iowans have cast ballots.

So, is it right to subject potentially 2,022 people to additional scrutiny because, at one point in time, they told the Iowa Department of Transportation they were not citizens? Even when state election officials acknowledge that some of them may well be legal voters.

This raises real equal protection concerns.

My concern is this: How many of these people have done nothing wrong but won’t want to bother with the hassle of finding documentation and coming back to election authorities to prove their eligibility?

How many will just walk away?

For those of us who don’t have to worry about being subjected to this kind of scrutiny, I suppose it’s easy enough to say it shouldn’t be too much trouble to provide the proof. But I don’t think many Iowans would appreciate being treated differently than their neighbors just because they turned up on a list that may be outdated.

Republicans tend to say we shouldn’t tolerate even one ineligible voter. But I believe it also is intolerable to violate the rights of even one eligible voter.

I don’t know what level of scrutiny Pate’s office applied to its list of 2,022 people. The Gazette reported last week the auditor in Linn County, a Democrat, said some of those who are on Pate’s list were confirmed to be citizens by federal immigration authorities.

The newspaper also reported Pate expressed frustration last week that state election officials have not been able to get access to a federal database that verifies immigration status.

Perhaps access to federal databases might have helped refine Pate’s list. But even so, these federal databases, which themselves are said to be flawed, aren’t likely to support Republican claims about non-citizen voting in the US.

In Georgia, election officials said this summer they were using state and federal databases to audit their voter rolls, and last week they declared only 20 non-citizens were registered to vote in the state—out of more than 8 million total. Another 156 people were being investigated.

Are we to believe that Iowa’s voter rolls are in worse shape than in Georgia?

So, I ask again: Is it right to throw a blanket of suspicion over every one of these 2,022 people? And to do it less than two weeks before the election? According to the Gazette, Pate’s office only asked for information from the DOT in early October.

I believe Iowans should be equally concerned about erecting barriers that could discourage people from exercising their legal right to vote as much as we are about the unlikely prospect that ineligible people are casting ballots.

Unfortunately, the state may be violating the rights of some of these 2,022 people simply so it can provide comfort to others who will never have to worry about facing this kind of scrutiny.

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