SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The Trump administration sued California election officials on Thursday, asking a judge to bar the state from counting mail-in ballots for next month’s midterm elections from people the federal government considers “possibly” noncitizens until their identities are confirmed.
Read more: Justice Department threatens California with legal action over claims of non-citizens on voter rolls
The Justice Department said California officials failed to meet a 48-hour deadline to review a password-protected thumb drive containing 20,000 names that the federal government believed may be non-citizens who were on the ballot for the Nov. 3 election. The state mails ballots to all registered voters. A senior Justice Department official sent a letter earlier this week threatening legal action if California doesn’t comply.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said in a letter to the Justice Department that the federal government has not provided evidence to support its allegation that there are 20,000 non-citizen names on the state’s voter rolls. She pointed to an example in which the federal government claimed nearly 16,000 possible noncitizens were listed on Nevada’s voter rolls, but the state determined that all were actually U.S. citizens.
She also noted that voting has already begun in the state. Weber, a Democrat, said the Justice Department “required unprecedented measures that threaten the voting rights of thousands of Californians and are based on unverifiable information or methodology that you remain unable to explain or provide.”
She added that California’s elections were “fully compliant” with federal law.
Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan said in a statement that his office received the letter and thumb drive this week, along with a “handwritten note providing a password” to access a list of so-called non-citizens on the voter rolls. He said he didn’t consider thumb drives to be security devices. The secretary of state’s office said the password was written on a “Post-it note.”
The federal government sought to “cooperate” with California to identify non-citizens registered to vote in the state, but “California made no serious effort to do so,” the Justice Department lawsuit said.
“As a result, the United States seeks general election relief when ballots are challenged,” the lawsuit states. “This court should enjoin California from currently counting mail-in ballots of would-be non-citizens in its upcoming federal elections until the voter’s citizenship status is determined.”
Weber, named in the lawsuit, said the federal government’s outreach efforts are not collaborative.
This summer, she said, the Department of Homeland Security claimed there were 190,000 noncitizens on California’s voter rolls but declined to provide the methodology or source of the data when the office asked.
In her Thursday letter, she called the latest request an “emergency created by the Department of Justice.”
The letter from Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter gives the state 48 hours to study a list of 20,000 people it claims may not be citizens. For those who cannot independently verify citizenship, the state will instruct local election officials to separate mail-in ballots until their identity is determined and not to provide ballots to anyone who has not yet received their ballot.
Read more: Trump’s focus on non-citizen voting led to 160 arrests. Experts say this shows it’s rare
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at an unrelated news conference Thursday morning that state officials will not enforce federal requests to withhold ballots for so-called non-citizen voters. He noted that the number of noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls that the administration claims has dropped from the 190,000 the Department of Homeland Security flagged this summer to the 20,000 the Justice Department noted.
“What happened to those 170,000 people? They just made a mistake,” Bonta said.
Bonta also said the Trump administration violated a federal law that prohibits states from changing voter rolls within 90 days of an election.
“They are in unprecedented, baseless, lawless territory,” he said.
The Trump administration has made finding noncitizen voters a priority this year, even though the problem is extremely rare. So far this year, the Justice Department has charged about 90 people with various types of election misconduct, 50 of whom allegedly voted as noncitizens. During the 2024 presidential election, there will be more than 227 million registered voters in the United States.
Austin reported from Sacramento, Calif., and Riedel reported from Los Angeles.
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