From BIG LIE to the BIG CHEAT

Iowans! Check your registration. And vote by mail. Both ASAP.

Nevit Dilmen. Wikimedia Commons

We’ve been living with the Big Lie for the last 5 1/2 years. And now we are living with the Big Cheat as well. Iowa MAGAs are going all in for rigging the midterms and 2028.

Because Iowa, for the first time in a decade, has a good chance to flip the governorship, a senator, and at least two house members, among others, this is the worst possible time to let down on defense or hesitate to go all out on offense to stop the steal.

Yes, I know Stop the Steal is a MAGA phrase. But the midterms will be another “projection election,” where Republicans scream that others are cheating to hide their own cheating. And it’s still an Orwellian world where their hypocritical calls for election integrity really mean election rigging.

The latest MAGA assault on Iowa elections is Secretary of State Paul Pate doing a 180º and turning over voter registration data, including driver’s license and partial Society Security numbers, to the US Department of Justice after he said last month he had “serious concerns” about doing so.

Back then Pate insisted, correctly, that “the U.S. Constitution says elections are run by the states.” Now he says he’s legally obligated to turn over the data, even though 30 states and the District of Columbia have refused. Even though the excuse for Federal interference— the myth of massive non-citizen voting—is obviously trumped up. And even though courts have consistently dismissed suits trying to force states to comply with the list grab.

This isn’t Pate’s first episode of election rigging. As Ed Tibbet reported in Bleeding Heartland last year, Secretary of State Paul Pate targeted 2,200 voters in a last minute challenge before the 2024 election. Pate found only 35 non-citizens out of 1.67 million voters. Of course the point was voter intimidation, not election “security.”

Fortunately, the ACLU of Iowa fought back. They got wind of Paul Pate’s secret list before the election and sent a legal advisory letter to the 99 county auditors, urging them “to reinstate anyone they had improperly removed.” That warning meant hundreds of Iowa voters could vote on Election Day. And they sued Pate and won a settlement agreement that he would not use the secret list and not rely only on Department of Transportation records, which was what led to eligible voters being wrongly flagged.

“One illegal vote is too many,” seems to be the MAGA mantra, used to justify any and all voter suppression measures. Why don’t MAGA Republicans care about “how many people lose their vote through the government’s aggressive abuse of power?” The question answers itself.

We wouldn’t be having all these attacks on the voting system if Trump hadn’t led a deadly attack on the US Capitol and then lied about it, “bigly”. And right after that Democrats had some successes. They were collecting signatures to force a special election in Warren County after the county board of supervisors appointed a 2020 election denier, David Whipple, as county auditor. They succeeded. A Democrat, Kimberly Sheets, was elected with 77% of the vote.

So where are Iowa Democrats now? (And small d democrats of any persuasion who care about free and fair elections?) On the defensive, unfortunately.

The Iowa Senate passed a bill (SF2203), which later failed in the House, to use the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, managed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), to check Iowa rolls for illegal voters.

In 2025 the MAGA legislature passed and the governor signed House File 954. That expanded purges of voter rolls, banned rank choice voting, tightened voter registration requirements, and made citizenship checks for new registrants more frequent. Voters not found in the voter database are flagged as “unconfirmed” and have 90 days to show proof of citizenship or have their registration canceled.

House File 2501, signed into law just last week, ended a provision that let a neighbor or relative attest the identity of a voter who didn’t have the required form of ID on Election Day.

And since 2021, Iowa law threatens local election officials with fines or even jail time for “not complying with” these complicated new state election requirements—threats that may make well-meaning officials, often volunteers, hesitant to give the benefit of the doubt to voters.

We haven’t even mentioned new Federal legislation to rig elections, or “Nationalize” or “Federalize” them as Trump puts it, even though elections are the responsibility of the states, under the Constitution. There are the various versions of the SAVE Act in Congress (not to be confused with the SAVE database described above). The Federal SAVE act should be called the Destroy act, as it guts online voter registration, makes 8 out of 10 married women endure “a paper trail of court orders” to register under their married name, imposes burdens on people with disabilities and on students. It bans what is already banned, immigrants voting, and many other things—as Ralph Rosenberg, a frequent Bleeding Heartland contributor, summarized recently.

Then there is the threat of ICE/Border Patrol agents being sent by Trump to “guard” polling stations—really occupy them. In some deep blue states there are attempts by legislatures to ban ICE/BP from polling places, according to Talking Points Memo. And there’s an attempt in some states to ban ICE/BP from polling places. But of course that’s impossible in Iowa currently.

So what’s to be done? Democrats and democrats (small d) can build on the (few) recent victories to fight the onslaught of these cheats.

One way is to support the ACLU of Iowa in its fight for voting rights. The League of Women Voters of Iowa (LWVIA) is also vigilant guarding elections from cheating—true election integrity. The have a good email list and an app, League in Action (Apple / Google).

Another way is to look for allies in spotting and calling out election cheating—including and perhaps especially among our Republican friends. As Knott pointed out, “Many Republicans do support democracy.” In 2020 and 2022, “GOP election officials were on the front lines defending the accuracy of the results.”

Iowans who care about stopping the steal can be (and I fervently hope are now) gaming out scenarios for MAGA cheating and ways to counter it, as is happening at the Federal level with House Democrats running “war games” to stop “about 150 threats” they have identified.

The leader of that US House Democrats “war games” group in the federal election oversight committee, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), has some advice Iowas can all take and do right now. Morelle says what “helps us deal with intimidation at polls is, tell people, ‘vote early, mail in your ballot.’”

“Do it as soon as you can. Check your registration status to make sure that the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t purged you or anybody else has tried to purge you and check your registration status in the first available moment. Mark your ballot, put it in the mail and send it in because they can’t intimidate people if they’re not there at the polling place.”

In Iowa we can check our voter registrion online and request an absentee ballot online. We can help others who can’t do it online. [Here’s a great explainer on voting rights from the ACLU of Iowa.]

This is one simple thing out of many that citizens can do to call out the Big Lie and stop the Big Cheat before it can happen.