With ballots already in voters’ hands, the Trump administration has asked a federal judge to set aside votes from people it calls likely noncitizens, a demand California officials say rests on an unverified list.
By Staff Reporter
The Justice Department has asked a federal court to order California to set aside the mail ballots of more than 20,000 registered voters whom federal immigration officials describe as likely noncitizens, escalating a long-running dispute over the state’s voter rolls less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 general election.
The complaint, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and styled as an “action seeking statewide relief,” names the State of California, Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber and Dean C. Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder and county clerk. It asks the court to bar the state from “presently tabulating vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens” until each voter’s citizenship is verified “beyond relying on unverified statements of citizenship necessary to registering.”
State officials have refused to act on the list, saying the federal government has not explained how the names were chosen and that the timing would put eligible citizens at risk of losing their votes.
A thumb drive and a 48-hour deadline
The lawsuit followed letters sent on Tuesday by Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter to Ms. Weber and Mr. Logan. According to the complaint, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services compiled a list of more than 20,000 registrants and referred it to Homeland Security Investigations, which “reasonably believes that around 20,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in California,” with “many addresses listed in Los Angeles County.” The department gave the state until noon on Thursday to review the names and, where citizenship could not be confirmed, to set returned ballots aside.
The list arrived on a password-protected thumb drive. Mr. Logan’s office did not open it, saying it did not meet the registrar’s data-security standards, KQED reported.
“The Department of Justice has not provided the underlying evidence, source, or methodology supporting its assertions that individuals identified in its records are ineligible to vote,” Mr. Logan said in a statement quoted by The Guardian. “We cannot withhold or refuse to count ballots based solely on unverified allegations.”
In a letter to Mr. McCotter, Ms. Weber wrote: “I will not disenfranchise thousands of Californians—or order any county elections official to do so—based solely upon an unsupported and likely inaccurate ‘belie[f]’ that certain voters are ‘likely’ noncitizens,” according to Democracy Docket, which published the letter.
Federal officials framed the suit as an effort to protect the vote. “State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in the department’s announcement. Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said California officials “were given an opportunity to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls and to sequester ballots returned from suspected ineligible voters. They refused.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom called the suit “a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.” Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office represents the state, wrote on X that “the Trump Admin’s last-minute demands are meritless, and we look forward to making our case in court.”
How the list was built, and what is known about it
The complaint describes a multistep review comparing California’s public voter files with federal immigration, State Department and Social Security records. A footnote acknowledges that California has not run its rolls through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE, and that the federal review was conducted independently of it.
The figure is far smaller than earlier federal claims. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin previously said more than 190,000 registered Californians “may be” noncitizens, a figure Ms. Weber has said she has “serious doubts” about. When federal officials gave Nevada 185 names of people they strongly believed were noncitizens, state officials found that every one was a citizen, The Guardian reported.
For scale, California has roughly 23 million registered voters, a figure Ms. Weber cited last year when the Justice Department sued the state for access to its full voter file. The 20,000 names would represent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of that total.
Election law scholars are skeptical. Richard L. Hasen of the University of California, Los Angeles, noted in a blog post that the National Voter Registration Act “bars systematic purges of ineligible voters in the 90-day period before the election,” a rule intended to prevent “the removal of eligible voters who are mistakenly flagged as noncitizens.” In an online post cited by NPR, he predicted the suit would “go nowhere.”
What it means for California voters
Under a 2021 law that made pandemic-era practice permanent, California mails a ballot to every registered voter at least 29 days before an election; Los Angeles County began mailing on Oct. 1. Because the department seeks statewide relief, an order in its favor could reach counties far beyond Los Angeles, though neither the state nor federal officials have publicly identified where the flagged voters live outside that county.
A separate legal track is already underway. On Thursday, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the UCLA Voting Rights Project, whose attorneys include former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, filed an emergency motion asking a federal court to bar the government from using the list to withhold or segregate ballots. The groups said the court directed the parties to propose a briefing schedule by Friday.
The dispute carries a particular wrinkle in San Francisco, where some noncitizen parents and guardians may vote in Board of Education races using a separate registration and a ballot limited to that contest. The federal statute at the center of the lawsuit, as the complaint itself notes, permits noncitizen voting in local contests conducted independently of federal races.
Absent a court order, counties continue to process ballots under state law. Voters can follow their own ballots through the secretary of state’s Where’s My Ballot service.
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