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After Barack Obama won the 2008 Iowa caucuses, rumors swirled.

The record turnout of 240,000 – an unprecedented figure – raised concerns that out-of-state voters had crossed the border and cast ballots in the caucuses. Part of those charges targeted Scott County.

There were stories at the time that buses suddenly arrived from Illinois with new voters on the night of the caucuses.

As a politics reporter for the Quad-City Times, I decided to take a look. I obtained a list of voters who registered on caucus day from the Scott County Auditor’s Office. There were lots of names. I then took a random sample – also a fairly large number, if I remember correctly – and compared them to an Iowa Department of Transportation database.

A surprisingly large number of these new voters did not register. I wondered: could the rumors be true?

Let’s be clear, the rumors were not true.

I dug deeper and after a lengthy investigation, which also involved other sources – as well as shoe leathers visiting the homes of these newly registered voters – I discovered they were legitimate. There was no story there. If I remember correctly, there was only one person in my sample that I couldn’t locate.

One of the lessons I learned from this experience: databases can be misleading.

This experience came to my mind while reading news items this week, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate’s office reported that 87 people had voted in the state, then told the Iowa DOT that they were not citizens; In addition, another 67 people registered to vote but did not vote, then told DOT they were not citizens either, the office said.

Pate said he turned over all 154 names to the Iowa Attorney General’s Office and the Iowa Department of Public Safety for possible prosecution.

I don’t know if the data at issue here is accurate or not. My experience teaches me to be careful. I learned this in 2008. The Des Moines Register reported Joe Enriquez Henry, political director of the League of United Latino Citizens of Iowa, said it was possible that some voters who were flagged as non-citizens by the DOT could, in fact, be citizens but due to language barriers, they did not understand the agency’s message. form.

Pate’s press release also states that they discovered 2,022 people who said they were not citizens, and after that they voted or registered to vote. These people may have become citizens before registering or voting, according to the secretary of state’s office.

This year, they will have to vote by provisional ballot, meaning they will have to prove their eligibility to a special review board before their ballots can be counted.

Obviously, it is not legal for non-citizens to register or vote in Iowa. And if these people knowingly broke the law, they should be held accountable. I have no doubt that this is something that Attorney General Brenna Bird would surely pursue.

Regardless of the outcome, I believe in the overall integrity of Iowa’s election system. The number of people proven to have voted illegally in Iowa is little. And even if the 87 people Pate reported had voted illegally, that would still represent a relatively insignificant number. There are 2.3 million voter records in Iowa’s voter file, meaning 87 represents one in 26,000. (It is important to note that it is not clear when these 87 people would have voted. The list of states dates back to the year 2000.)

Ultimately, I hope this development, which comes less than two weeks before Election Day, will not discourage people who are eligible to vote from going to the polls.

Leaders in this state talk a lot about ensuring that only eligible voters can vote, and they can be quite threatening about it, too. This is sure to worry people who don’t speak the language well or aren’t familiar with the rules. And, as we know, the state Legislature has come up with many new rules when it comes to voting.

Ultimately, the goal should not only be to ensure that only eligible people can vote in our elections, but we should also make sure that those who are eligible are not afraid to do so.

This column was originally published by Ed Tibbetts Along the Mississippi Newsletter on the substack. It is republished here via the Iowa Writers Collaborative.

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