ACLU, election integrity advocates locked in battle over removing ineligible voters from Iowa lists

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Iowa and election integrity advocates are locked in a battle over Iowa's ability to remove ineligible voters from its lists ahead of the midterm elections, documents and communications obtained by Just the News show. 

Iowa has become a surprising battleground in the Democrats’ and their allies’ efforts to win back the House of Representatives and the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections. Polling indicates that Republicans, who have dominated the state since 2016, are vulnerable there this year amid growing frustration with rising gas prices and the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the state’s agriculture industry. 

As those elections rapidly approach, election integrity advocates in the state have launched an effort to identify hundreds of Iowa registered voters who have since moved out of the state. Under Iowa law, citizens can challenge the voter registrations of other individuals based on a variety of factors, including out-of-state address changes. The effort is aimed at cleaning up the voter rolls before the election to remove ineligible voters.

However, the Democratic Party-aligned ACLU wrote to all 99 county auditors in the state, warning the election officials that any effort to cancel registrations based on citizen challenges “is very likely a violation of state and federal law” and advising them to “refrain from processing the challenges” until after the midterm elections. The ACLU cites federal statutes, specifically section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, that prohibit states from carrying out any programs that “systematically remove the names of ineligible voters” within 90 days of an election.

During the 2024 election, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, determined some counties had improperly removed voters from the rolls after challenges to their election status because the challenges landed within that 90-day window and ordered the counties to restore the voters to the rolls. 

However, Iowa law allows for individuals who are registered voters to file challenges to others’ voter registrations up until 70 days before the election. Local advocates this year filed hundreds of challenges in Iowa ahead of that 70-day deadline aiming to remove voters who appeared to have moved away from the state. Yet, local officials have said that they will not adjudicate the voter files during that 70-day window despite the fact that the advocates filed the petitions before. 

The discrepancy between federal and state law has set the ACLU and state government on a collision course with the election integrity advocates, who argue that the federal laws say nothing about individual challenges to voter registrations and therefore the adjudication process should proceed, even during the 70-day window provided by state law. 

The ACLU’s interpretation of the federal statutes appears to stem from a Justice Department guidance memo issued during the Biden administration which said that the 90-day deadline applies “to list maintenance programs based on third-party challenges derived from any large, computerized data-matching process.” The ACLU quoted this guidance in its letter to Iowa’s auditors. However, that language does not appear in the actual federal statutes. 

In fact, the federal statutes do not mention whether third-party or citizen-initiated challenges to voter eligibility are included in the prohibition during the 90-day quiet period cited by both ACLU and Secretary Pate. Cleta Mitchell, Senior Legal Fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute and Chairwoman of the Election Integrity Network, says that the ACLU is misinterpreting federal law to “threaten” local counties in order to prevent the challenges. 

“The ACLU has threatened every county and said if you enforce this law, you're violating federal law. Problem is that the statute that they're citing … a totally different kind of system,” Mitchell told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Thursday. 

“What that federal law says, and it needs to be updated, it's 30 plus years old and it's way outdated, but what that refers to is something that's initiated by the election office itself–a systematic review–and it says it right there in the statute. So they're mixing apples and oranges,” she added. \

The Iowa Secretary of State’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

One advocate who challenged several hundred voter registrations was told by the Black Hawk County auditor that the county would hold the required hearings to address the challenges, but would not remove any voters until after the 2026 midterm elections, according to an email obtained by Just the News. 

“Based on the guidance we received from both the Secretary of State’s Office and our County Attorney, we will move forward with notifying the challenged voters and holding the hearing as required,” the Black Hawk County auditor wrote. “However, any voter cancellations resulting from the challenges will be held until after the general election.”

Mitchell believes that the ACLU letter was designed to “intimidate” election officials and discourage them from removing ineligible voters under Iowa law ahead of the midterms.  

“The ACLU is intimidating the election officials, and I don't think that the Department of Justice should allow this to happen,” Mitchell told Just the News. “We've got to help these state and local election officials be able to do their jobs without the threat of intimidation and threat of litigation by these left-wing crazies who don't want integrity in our elections.”

"Our letter offering information and resources, which we publicly posted at the time simply informed county auditors that the 'quiet period' under federal law had begun. It was an effort to help both auditors and voters in our state," Mark Stringer, ACLU of Iowa Executive Director, told Just the News in a statement.