Iowa Board of Canvass certifies 2024 election results

The Iowa State Board of Canvass certified results from the 2024 general election Monday, finalizing results in races across the state.

The board, consisting of Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate,  Gov. Kim Reynolds, Treasurer Roby Smith, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig and Auditor Rob Sand, met virtually Monday. For all results outside of the presidential election, the board’s certification is the final step to make results from the Nov. 5 contests official as county boards of supervisors certified election results and the requested recounts in the weeks following the election.

Iowa’s six electors will meet Dec. 17 at the Iowa State Capitol to cast their votes for President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, and results from the presidential race will be certified by Congress Jan. 6, 2025.

GOP surpasses Democrats in early voting

Pate told reporters Monday that 74.1% of registered Iowa voters cast their ballots in the 2024 election — a total of 1,674,011 ballots cast. This turnout was roughly in line with previous presidential election cycles, he said, but noted that there was a change in party absentee and early voting participation in 2024 compared to previous years.

According to Pate, a total of 268,629 registered Republicans voted early this year, more than the 257,634 Democrats who voted early. While Democrats historically have an edge in early and absentee voting, Pate said part of the shift to higher GOP participation this year was part of a deliberate push by GOP leadership to encourage voting prior to Election Day.

In previous election cycles, Trump and allies have cast doubts on the integrity of absentee and early votes. But in the 2024 election cycle, Republicans across the ballot have spent time on the 2024 campaign trail reassuring supporters their votes would be correctly counted if they voted early.

“There was definitely a concentrated effort nationally on the Republican side like we hadn’t seen in quite a while telling them, ‘Vote now, it’s OK — go vote now,'” Pate said. “And so, people who may have voted more traditionally did just that.”

Pate called the high participation on and before Election Day “very impressive and significant,” thanking county auditors, election workers and volunteers for their work. He also thanked state lawmakers for recent changes to election law that helped make recount processes run more smoothly than previous years.

The recount process in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, where U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks won by 798 votes against Democrat Christina Bohannan, was conducted more quickly than previous recounts in the 1st Congressional District, he said. He said that was due in part to changes to Iowa Code and because of new guidance issued by his office calling for county auditors to avoid “hybrid” recounts, and either recount ballots either fully by hand or by tabulator machine.

“You don’t get to do both of them and mix the techniques up during the count process,” Pate said. “We ran into a lot of problems with that in the past because human errors and other things happen.”

Pate previews requested legislation

The secretary of state said he plans to make requests to the state Legislature in 2025 that would require counties follow a uniform process, which Pate said would further speed up results.

Additionally, Pate said he is in talks with lawmakers to take action on noncitizen voting in the upcoming legislative session. Pate’s guidance to county auditors in late October to challenge the ballots of more than 2,000 Iowans listed as potential noncitizens was upheld by a federal judge days before the general election.

Groups including the ACLU and the League of United Latin American Citizens said the measure intimidated immigrants who were legally able to participate in elections as naturalized citizens. But Pate argued that the measure was necessary because the federal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office would not share access to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database for the Iowa Secretary of State’s office to confirm the citizenship status of the individuals listed.

The 2,000 people identified as potential noncitizens were people who identified themselves to the Iowa Department of Transportation or other government entities as noncitizens in the past 12 years, who later registered to vote or voted.

“(USCIS) could have just handed it over and we could have been able to know exactly how many noncitizens were registered in Iowa and dealt with those in a very specific and targeted way rather than having to do the awkward approach we had to this time,” Pate said. “… So we’ve just got to continue to try to improve on that.”