BREAKING: Iowa Secures 20-Year Deal with DHS for Full Access to Federal Citizenship Database – Major Win for Election Integrity

Des Moines, IA – December 2, 2025 By Click USA News Staff

In a massive victory for election security, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird announced Monday that Iowa has officially settled its federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), securing free, unlimited, bulk access to the powerful Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database for the next 20 years.

The landmark agreement, reached with the incoming Trump administration and signed on November 28, 2025, ends a year-long legal battle that began under the Biden administration when DHS repeatedly blocked Republican-led states from using the federal database to verify voter citizenship at scale.

What Iowa Just Won:

• Full bulk access to the SAVE database – election officials can now upload thousands of voter records at once (including Social Security numbers) and get citizenship verification results in under 48 hours.
• Completely free for 20 years – no per-search fees, no limits on volume.
• No more one-at-a-time searches – Iowa is moving from a trickle of data to a firehose of real-time federal verification.
• Access will be fully operational by early March 2026, in time for the 2026 midterm primaries.

In exchange, Iowa will share just 1,000 random driver’s license records per year with DHS to help modernize and improve the accuracy of the federal database.

How We Got Here

The fight started in late 2024 when an Iowa audit flagged over 2,100 potential noncitizen registrations. When state officials asked DHS for help confirming citizenship status, the Biden-era agency refused to cooperate – even after admitting hundreds of potential noncitizens were on the rolls.

That stonewalling led Iowa, Florida, Indiana, and Ohio to sue the federal government in December 2024.

Fast-forward to 2025: Using limited SAVE access granted during the lawsuit, Iowa confirmed 277 individuals on the voter rolls were not U.S. citizens. Of those:

• 35 illegally voted in the 2024 general election
• 5 more were turned away at the polls

All 35 confirmed illegal votes have been referred for criminal prosecution – a felony in Iowa punishable by up to 5 years in prison.

A Game-Changer for 2026 and Beyond

Secretary of State Paul Pate called it “the biggest election security upgrade in Iowa history.”

“American elections are for American citizens – period,” Pate said. “This settlement finally gives us the tools we’ve been asking for since day one.”

The deal locks in Iowa as one of only four states in a DHS “expanded access” pilot program and guarantees the access survives future administrations for two full decades.

The Bottom Line

Iowa just turned a major federal roadblock into one of the strongest voter-roll verification systems in the nation – all at zero cost to taxpayers.

Election integrity advocates are celebrating. Critics who claimed the lawsuit was “political theater” have gone quiet after the state confirmed dozens of illegal votes in 2024 alone.

This is what winning looks like.

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