DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa Secretary of State spent the last election cycle using an Iowa Department of Transportation list to confirm citizenship amongst registered Iowa voters.

Before the first week of the 91st General Assembly Secretary of State Paul Pate’s office filed a couple of bills that would allow the state to get access to a federal SAVE list.

“I’m not looking for something that’s overly bureaucratic or won’t stand up the rest of the courts,” said Pate (R).

The bill states that the state registrar of voters can contract with federal, state and private entities for voter registration verification purposes and allows the state to adopt rules to use federal and state sources of information for voter registration file keeping.

“We want them to offer this list to us in a format that we can use readily. Which means we want social security information. We don’t just want a federal number that they have. A federal number doesn’t really help us, we don’t have it in our database and neither does any other state,” said Pate.

It would require the Department of Transportation to share a list of each person who has submitted documentation indicating the person is not a citizen of the United States, while requiring the state registrar of voters to compare the list with the list of registered voters. It also requires the voter registration to be canceled if the voter submitted documentation indicating they are not a citizen or reported it to a state or federal agency. It allows precinct election officials to question a person about citizenship status if the right of the person to vote is challenged by this list at the time of voting.

Another bill pre-filed by the Secretary of State is one that gets rid of ranked voting in the state. There is also legislation proposed that looks to clean up the operations of recounts in elections. Pate said that over the last several years the process has become a lot more efficient, but there is some tweaking left to do.

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