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Just two weeks out from the November 2024 presidential election, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate issued a directive to county clerks to challenge more than 2,000 voters at the polls on Election Day and force them to vote a provisional ballot that will count only if the voter can prove their citizenship. The Secretary’s list of more than 2,000 voters does not adequately account for Iowans who have recently become U.S. citizens through naturalization, and thus risks disenfranchising scores of eligible voters based on national origin. The Secretary’s eleventh-hour gambit violates several provisions of the U.S. Constitution and federal law, and we have thus filed emergency suit to enjoin the directive.

This case asks whether it violates equal protection principles to impose a prison sentence, instead of probation, based on a defendant’s inability to purchase a house. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative and the ACLU of Iowa filed an amicus brief arguing that imposing a harsher sentence based on a criminal defendant’s inability to purchase a home impinges on the equal protection guarantees in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and article I, sections 1 and 6 of the Iowa Constitution.

This case in the Iowa Supreme Court asked whether a city ordinance that mandates rental inspections every five years, irrespective of whether a tenant consents to the inspection and in the absence of individualized probable cause, violates the state constitution. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative assisted the ACLU of Iowa in filing an amicus brief to argue that tenants have a right under the Iowa Constitution to be free from non-consensual searches of their rented homes, absent a showing of individualized probable cause. The court ultimately held that the plaintiffs had raised only a facial challenge to the ordinance, and because the ordinance could operate without violating the Iowa Constitution in at least some circumstances, the challenge failed. The court's decision does not foreclose future challenges on an as-applied basis where the plaintiffs' claims are ripe for review.