The Iowa Secretary of State’s order to dispatch election workers remains in effect after a judge refused to intervene. The judge said Pate had backtracked on parameters of his original order that the court disagreed with. Registered voters on the list, including naturalized citizens, will need to prove their citizenship for their ballot to be counted.

Over the weekend, a federal judge declined to get involved in the Secretary of State’s order requiring 2,176 registered voters to prove their citizenship for their votes to be counted.

Iowa’s starting line has shown that the state’s still-secret list contains US citizens eligible to vote. U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher said, based on the evidence, that the number of ineligible voters on the list was “relatively small: no more than twelve percent.” But if the court got involved, the result would “force local election officials to allow those people to vote.”

“Today’s ruling by the Federal District Court is a victory for Iowa’s election integrity,” Secretary of State Paul Pate said in a statement Sunday night. “American elections are for American citizens, and ensuring that only eligible voters participate in Iowa’s electoral process is essential to protecting the integrity of the vote.”

In his ruling, the judge wrote that Pate’s hesitations since his initial order to poll workers helped the merits of his case. Initially, Pate said that if a poll worker discovers that a voter is on the list, they should force them to fill out a provisional ballot. In other words, even if the poll worker knew that the voter was a citizen, either through available documentation or the poll worker’s knowledge, he or she was required to fill out a provisional ballot. But when Pate’s order was challenged, his position changed.

“Clerk Pate departed from the clear positions of his letter,” Judge Locher wrote. “…(He) has implicitly admitted that local officials retain the authority to make independent judgments about whether there is a valid basis to question a voter’s eligibility.”

The lawyers argued that the list was created in such a way that it targeted naturalized U.S. citizens. But he made a distinction between a list that includes naturalized citizens and a list composed of naturalized citizens. There are more than 79,000 naturalized citizens in Iowa. While Pate’s list includes some naturalized citizens, he did not make the list to include people of a certain national origin, but rather because there was a discrepancy between voter registration information and information provided to the Iowa Department of Transportation. Therefore, it found that equal protection grounds were not sufficient.

Time was an important factor here. Pate made his request two weeks before Election Day. The judge’s decision came two days before Election Day. The judge cited recent case law demonstrating high standards for courts intervening in the run-up to an election. In one, Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights v. Beals, Election officials removed voters from the rolls entirely due to discrepancies between voter registration records and records held by other state agencies regarding citizenship.

Pate is not removing voters from the voter rolls. It only requires that they fill out provisional ballots. The judge said this minimized the damage caused.

“In essence, this Court would be ignoring how the Supreme Court handled a situation in which the plaintiffs had an even stronger legal argument than the plaintiffs have here. The Court cannot do this,” he wrote.

“We are obviously disappointed in the court’s decision not to outright block Secretary Pate’s directive, which we still fear threatens to disenfranchise eligible voters simply because they are people who became citizens in recent years,” the director said. ACLU of Iowa legal counsel Rita Bettis Austen. in a statement. “In the meantime, we encourage all citizens, and especially our new fellow citizens, to vote in this week’s presidential election. “Voting is your right.”

Under the current order, anyone who needs to prove their citizenship at the polls will be required to present a valid U.S. passport, a certified U.S. birth certificate, a report of birth abroad, or a certificate of citizenship or naturalization from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. the United States.