(Radio Iowa) – A spokesperson for Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird says prosecutors have filed felony charges in six cases of alleged election fraud. In March, Secretary of State Paul Pate announced an audit found 35 non-citizens voted in Iowa last year and five others tried to vote, but their ballots were rejected. Another 237 people were registered to vote in Iowa, but did not cast a ballot.

“It does take a while for the DCI to get through that many names,” Pate says. The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation is in charge of reviewing Pate’s list of 277 potential non-citizens who allegedly voted OR were registered to vote in 2024. This year, the legislature gave Pate authority to use federal data or hire private entities to check Iowa’s voter registration records and flag potential non-citizens.

“What we’re trying to do is put safeguards in now so that on the registration side we can deal with this much more effectively,” Pate said. Two weeks before last November’s election, Pate asked county election officials to challenge the ballots of over two-thousand registered voters who were legal U-S residents when they got an Iowa driver’s license, but might not have become U-S citizens.

“Doing it on Election Day at a polling site when you have thousands of people coming into vote and you’re trying to expedite the process is not ideal for trying to check on citizenship,” Pate says. Pate says that’s why it was important to get authority to be pro-active well before Election Day and cross-check voter registration records with citizenship data.

Nearly one-point-seven MILLION Iowans voted in 2024 and critics say Pate’s list of 40 people who voted or tried to vote last year is a small fraction of all votes cast.