Floor Remarks by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
Senate President Pro Tempore
“Noncitizen Voters”
Monday, December 8, 2025

VIDEO

In early November, the U.S. Citizenship [and] Immigration Services announced improvements to their voter verification system.

Now, states can use a program named the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) to verify that only citizens [are] voting in the federal elections.

This is welcome news.

So, here’s why it’s welcome news. During the 2024 election, Iowa’s election official, Secretary of State Paul Pate, sought confirmation of citizenship status for 2,176 voters that, based on Driver Motor Vehicle records, may have been noncitizens.

The Biden-Harris administration refused – yes, refused – to give Secretary Pate the information he needed to confirm whether these 2,176 voters were eligible to vote, which kind of proves that the previous administration was not interested in verifying citizenship for voting.

Now that the Trump administration has allowed Secretary Pate access to the SAVE program, we know that 277 people from Iowa’s 2024 voter registration list were noncitizens.

In other words, potentially 277 people could’ve voted if they wanted to, and I’ll tell you that some did.

While the Biden-Harris administration refused to verify the citizenship of these voters, 40 noncitizens attempted to vote in Iowa.

Five of those attempts were caught before the ballots were counted, but 35 unlawful ballots were actually tallied.

Thanks to President Trump’s executive order concerning election integrity and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ needed upgrades to the SAVE system, other states can avoid the uncertainty that Iowa had in last year’s election.

And the voters in those states can have peace of mind that noncitizens won’t be voting. Because when noncitizens vote, it reduces the value of every legal vote.

I would encourage these states to participate in this program.

I want to thank the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for their improvements to the SAVE program.

And I also want to thank Iowa’s Secretary of State Paul Pate for his commitment to election integrity and the Trump administration for providing Iowa the information needed to confirm the citizenship of its voters.

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