A spokesperson for Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird says prosecutors have filed felony charges in six cases of alleged election fraud.
In March, Secretary of State Paul Pate announced an audit found 35 non-citizens voted in Iowa last year and five others tried to vote, but their ballots were rejected. Another 237 people were registered to vote in Iowa, but did not cast a ballot. “It does take a while for the DCI to get through that many names,” Pate said during a recent appearance on “Iowa Press” on Iowa PBS.
The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation is in charge of reviewing Pate’s list of 277 potential non-citizens who allegedly voted or were registered to vote in 2024. This year, the legislature gave Pate authority to use federal data or “private entities” to check Iowa’s voter registration records and flag potential non-citizens. “What we’re trying to do is put safeguards in now so that on the registration side we can deal with this much more effectively,” Pate said.
Two weeks before last November’s election, Pate asked county election officials to challenge the ballots of over 2100 registered voters who were legal U.S. residents when they got an Iowa driver’s license over the past 12 years, but might not have become U.S. citizens. “Doing it on Election Day at a polling site when you have thousands of people coming into vote and you’re trying to expedite the process is not ideal for trying to check on citizenship,” Pate said