The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation filed election misconduct charges Thursday against three Council Bluffs residents, alleging they registered to vote without U.S. citizenship and voted in at least one election.

The charges followed an investigation by a DCI agent assigned to work with Secretary of State Matt Schultz to root out voter fraud. Schultz, who is being targeted by lawsuits over efforts he says are aimed at preventing such fraud, gave DCI more than 1,000 names of potential noncitizens who had voted since 2010.

The three people arrested in Iowa, where it's a felony for noncitizens to vote, were 52-year-old Albert Harte-Maxwell and 49-year-old Linda Harte-Maxwell, along with Maria Ayon-Fernandez, 40. The Harte-Maxwells have Canadian citizenship, and Ayon-Fernandez is from Mexico. All three were booked into the Pottawattamie County jail on Thursday and released.

Court documents allege that Albert Harte-Maxwell registered to vote in Pottawattamie County, swearing he was a U.S. citizen but knowing it was false. He told a DCI agent during an interview Sept. 7 that he thought he was only prohibited from voting in presidential elections, and admitted voting in the November 2010 election for governor and the 2011 city elections.

He declined to discuss the charges until after he's had a chance to talk with an attorney.

"I do have some views I just don't know if they would be pertinent or useful to our case," he said. "I will say this, when we were being I guess you would call it booked, they had not done this very often because nobody had any idea how to do it."

Linda Harte-Maxwell told the agent a similar story and voted in the 2011 city election, according to court documents.

Ayon-Fernandez, who was born in Mexico but lived in California most of her life, was interviewed Aug. 17 and told another DCI agent that she registered to vote in California but switched it to Iowa when she moved. She told the agent she believed she was a U.S. citizen but could not come up with documents to prove it. She said she voted in previous elections but couldn't recall which ones, and the agent concluded she voted in the November 2010 election.

Both women couldn't be reached for comment Thursday.

Schultz, a Republican, has made voter fraud a central issue in his first term as Iowa's top elections official. He had collected more than 3,500 names listed in an Iowa Department of Transportation database as noncitizens who had registered to vote, and more than 1,200 of them were shown as having voted in the 2010 general election. He turned the names over to the DCI for investigation.

Schultz believes the three arrests are only the beginning of finding unlawful voters.

"I think we're doing the right thing," he said. "The results will show that. It's something we really didn't know if there was fraud going on. That's why we needed a professional to do the investigations."

He said it's the first time the secretary of state has had a full-time investigator to look into election fraud. It's also the first time investigations have been based on names matched in voter rolls against other databases, in this case the Department of Transportation lists.

Schultz had tried to establish new emergency rules that would allow him to further match names against a federal immigration database so votes could be challenged in the November general election. But those rules were put on hold last week by a judge, who said Schultz should have held public hearings and followed other normal rulemaking procedures. The judge also said the rules and threats of jailing violators were scaring legitimate voters.

Schultz had been sued by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa and the League of United Latin American Citizens. The groups claim Schultz overstepped his authority and the rules he drafted are unlawful.

"Our lawsuit is directed at preventing voter intimidation and protecting the democratic process," ACLU attorney Rita Bettis said Thursday. "We have no information with respect to those criminal charges, and will await the facts like everyone else. But it goes without saying that these are allegations, not convictions."

Schultz said without the further match to the immigration database, the investigations are left to the DCI agents to use their own investigative tools seeking out unlawfully registered voters one at a time.

Schultz has a contract with the DCI to reimburse the cost of the agents up to $140,000 a year for two years.

Schultz said the judge's ruling last week has no effect on the DCI investigations because they aren't part of the halted rules.