DES MOINES, Iowa — Four voters and a Hispanic civil rights group have filed a lawsuit against Iowa’s top election official after he instructed election workers to challenge the votes of naturalized people, alleging the state violated the rights of noncitizens in an effort to keep them out of the polls. voting illegally.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa filed a legal challenge in federal court late Wednesday on behalf of four people flagged by Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate as registered voters who may not be citizens. According to the complaint, they are naturalized citizens.

Pate’s office told county supervisors last week that it provided the state Department of Transportation with a list of 2,022 people who said they were not citizens but later registered to vote or vote. Because these people may have been naturalized citizens in the interim, Pate’s office told county election officials to challenge the ballots and cast provisional ballots instead.

They will have seven days, one day longer than usual because of the federal holiday, to prove their citizenship status in order for their ballots to be counted.

Last year, a new voter registered a day after becoming a U.S. citizen, according to the complaint.

“Yet he was placed on the Minister’s secret list and unfairly subjected to investigation and election challenge for complying with the law and exercising his right to vote,” the complaint states.

The ACLU also represents the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa.

It is illegal for non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections, but there is no evidence it is happening in significant numbers, although dozens of such cases have been identified in Iowa and some other states.

Before the lawsuit was filed, Pate told reporters at a news conference Wednesday that the DOT list was “the only list we have” that does not have access to federal immigration records.

“We are balancing this process. We want everyone to be able to vote. “For this reason, none of them were removed from the voter rolls,” he said. But “we have an obligation to make sure they are citizens now.”

With early voting continuing rapidly and just days before the November 5 elections, the lawsuit demands that the list be canceled and voters not be challenged on this basis. The lawsuit alleges that election officials in Iowa burdened the right to vote and discriminated against naturalized citizens, treating these voters differently from others, violating their constitutional right to equal protection.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said Wednesday ahead of the ACLU’s lawsuit that the U.S. Department of Justice “summoned the State in an effort to pressure Iowa to allow noncitizens to vote.”

“Every legal vote must be counted and not canceled out by an illegal vote,” he said. “We will defend our election integrity laws and protect the vote in Iowa.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment in an email.

The Associated Press left email messages with Pate and Bird on Thursday seeking comment on the ACLU’s lawsuit.

Pate sought to distinguish Iowa from other states such as Virginia, where more than 1,600 voters have been removed from voter registration rolls in the past two months under a program enacted by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Aug. 7 executive order.

The Justice Department and a coalition of private groups sued Virginia in early October, arguing that state election officials violated federal law’s 90-day “quiet period” before the election.

The National Voter Registration Act requires this quiet period to ensure that legitimate voters are not removed from the rolls due to bureaucratic errors or last-minute errors that cannot be quickly corrected.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority said Wednesday that Virginia could proceed, overruling a federal judge who said the state’s purge was illegal. The federal appeals court had previously allowed the judge’s order to stand.

In a similar case in Alabama, a federal judge this month ordered the state to restore the right to vote to more than 3,200 non-citizen voters who were deemed ineligible. Testimony from state officials in that case showed that approximately 2,000 of the 3,251 voters deactivated were actually legally registered citizens.