Iowa Republicans are moving to more easily check voters’ citizenship status, make it more difficult for third parties to gain major party status in Iowa, ban ranked choice voting and overhaul the state’s election recount procedures.
The changes come in a pair of bills that passed the Iowa House Tuesday. The legislation now goes to the Iowa Senate for consideration.
Lawmakers voted 65-31 along party lines to pass House File 954, which contains provisions dealing with voter citizenship, third parties and ranked choice voting.
House lawmakers also voted 66-31 Tuesday to pass House File 928, which amends the state’s recount process. One Democrat, Rep. Austin Baeth, D-Des Moines, joined all Republicans in support.
Poll workers could ask voters about their citizenship status
House File 954 gives the Iowa secretary of state’s office new tools to confirm voters’ citizenship status, seeking to avoid repeating the chaotic weeks before the 2024 election when hundreds of Iowans had their ballots challenged at the polls based on sometimes out of date information suggesting they might not be citizens.
The bill’s floor manager, Rep. Austin Harris, R-Moulton, said he believes that section of the bill is “by far” the most important part of the legislation.
“Just one illegal vote is an attack on all of our votes,” Harris said. “To me it threatens what it means to be an American.”
The office would gain the ability to contract with “state and federal government agencies and private entities” to check voters’ records. And the legislation requires the Iowa Department of Transportation to send the secretary of state’s office a list of everyone 17 years old and older who has submitted documentation to the DOT saying they are not a citizen.
If a registered voter’s citizenship status is in question, they must provide documentation affirming they are legally eligible to register and they will be designated as an active registered voter.
Poll workers would also be allowed to challenge a voter at the polls on the basis of their citizenship status.
Pate announced last week that an audit of the state’s voter registration list confirmed 277 noncitizens on Iowa’s voter rolls, including 35 noncitizens who successfully voted in the 2024 election and five more who tried to vote but had their ballots rejected.
More: After flagging 2,000+ ballots, Iowa secretary of state says 35 noncitizens voted in 2024
Parties would need to earn 2% of the vote in three consecutive elections to qualify as a major party
Political parties would need to receive at least 2% of the vote in three consecutive general elections in order to be recognized as major political parties in Iowa.
Current law allows major party status to be awarded to parties whose presidential or gubernatorial candidates earn 2% of the vote in one general election.
Libertarians have objected to efforts to make it more difficult to qualify as a major party in Iowa.
Libertarians gained major party status following the 2016 election, lost it following the 2018 election, gained it again following the 2022 election and lost it again after last fall’s presidential election.
The party’s presidential or gubernatorial candidate has never received 2% of the vote in three consecutive general elections.
Rep. Adam Zabner, D-Iowa City, said “folks are fed up with our polarized two-party system.” But, he said, the bill makes it harder for alternatives to Democrats and Republicans to reach major party status or appear on the ballot.
“It limits the options of Iowans, it boxes out competition and it begs the question, what is the majority party scared of?” Zabner said.
Ranked choice voting would be banned in Iowa
Ranked choice voting would be banned in Iowa, although the voting method is not currently used in any elections in the state.
The legislation says any statewide or local government could not conduct elections using ranked-choice voting, sometimes known as instant runoff voting, which involves ranking each candidate in order of preference and reallocating votes to a voter’s second choice if their first choice fails to win a majority.
It mirrors the language in Senate File 459, which the Senate passed on a party line vote last week.
Rep. Austin Baeth, D-Des Moines, introduced an amendment that would have allowed local governments to conduct ranked choice voting elections. He said the procedure could lessen partisanship because it requires the winning candidate to receive a majority of votes.
“Iowans are sick of hyper-partisan politics,” he said. “They’re sick of having to choose between blue and red. They’d like to have a little bit more choice because none of us here perfectly adhere to one particular party and neither do Iowans.”
Republicans voted down the amendment.
Harris said using ranked choice voting would take longer, cost money to update Iowa’s voting tabulators and would confuse voters.
“This procedure would cause us to take days to figure out the results, if not weeks,” he said. “It would certainly be a heavy lift to inform the public on how this new system would work and I think certainly cause some confusion.”
Bill would only allow recounts in elections decided by 1% or less
House File 928, overhauling Iowa’s recount process, comes after years of efforts and close elections.
“These fixes will bring consistency, reliability, fairness, uniformity and enforcement, creating a fair process to recount our elections and for our citizens — no matter their political party — to have faith and trust that despite a close election the result is accurate,” Harris said.
Candidates would only be able to request recounts in local or state legislative races if the election was decided by 1% or 50 votes, whichever is less. For statewide and federal races, candidates could only request a recount if the election was within 0.15%.
Under current law, candidates can request a recount regardless of the winner’s margin of victory, but the state only pays the costs if the results of the election are within one percentage point.
The new recount threshold means that Democrat Christina Bohannan would not have been allowed to request a recount in her 2024 race against U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks in southeast Iowa’s 1st Congressional District. Miller-Meeks won the race by 798 votes, or 0.2%.
“When we request a recount, we’re essentially asserting that the initial count was wrong,” said Harris, a former staffer for Miller-Meeks. “And I think that we have to have a high standard to be able to do that.”
The bill would have the state pick up the costs of the recount in all cases.
The bill would require recounts to be conducted using Iowa’s vote tabulators. Recounts could only be conducted by hand in extraordinary circumstances, defined to include machine failures, a discrepancy between the results of the election and an initial recount and a number of overvotes that exceeds the margin between the candidates.
And recounts would be conducted by county auditors and their staff of election workers under the bill, rather than the current system, which uses a recount board with members appointed by the leading and trailing political candidates, as well as a third agreed-upon member.
Auditors would be required to appoint an equal number of election workers from each political party to conduct the recount.
The political candidates involved in the recount would be allowed to appoint observers to monitor the process.
Zabner said opposes doing away with the current recount board structure and leaving the final decision on close cases about whether or not to count a ballot to county auditors, who are partisan elected officials.
“We’ve seen when this process takes place that there’s oftentimes disagreements about how to count these ballots,” he said. “My concern is that I would much rather have that disagreement decided by a three-member board — one from each party and an independent or neutral member — than by a partisan elected official.”
Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. He can be reached by email at sgrubermil@registermedia.com or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on X at @sgrubermiller.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa House passes pair of election overhaul bills. Here’s what they do
