Justice Department Sues California to Set Aside Ballots of Suspected Noncitizens

The Justice Department sued California on Thursday, accusing state officials of refusing to review a federal list of people the Trump administration says are likely noncitizens who were sent mail ballots for next month’s election, and asking a judge to order their ballots set aside.

The lawsuit came two days after Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter sent letters to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan. The letters demanded that officials review the list, contained on a password-protected thumb drive, and confirm within 48 hours that they would “segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots” until their citizenship could be determined. The drive arrived at the county office with its password written on a sticky note.

The department says it is not seeking a purge of the voter rolls or the cancellation of any votes, only that the ballots be held aside. Its suit relies on the Constitution’s supremacy clause and was filed by senior officials in the deputy attorney general’s office rather than by the department’s Civil Rights Division, which ordinarily handles voting cases. A department spokeswoman, Kiersten Pels, said the department would take all necessary legal action to protect election integrity and ensure compliance with federal law, according to Reuters, as republished by GV Wire.

California officials rejected the demand. Logan said his office has not opened the drive because doing so would conflict with its data privacy and security protocols, and that the device is not a secure medium. Any removal of a voter, he said, must rest on verifiable information rather than unconfirmed data matching. Weber said the department’s efforts were an attempt to “cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” and argued that the administration has no legal authority for the request. State officials have called the demand legally baseless and a last-minute attempt to intervene in California’s election.

It is not clear how many names are on the list or how many are accurate. The county clerk said the letter did not specify a number, though the list reportedly runs to thousands of names. Evidence and prosecutions show that noncitizen voting is rare. In an earlier exchange, Nevada reviewed 185 people flagged by the Department of Homeland Security and found that all of them were citizens. The Justice Department has also lost more than two dozen consecutive court cases over its demands for state voter-roll data.

All registered voters in California receive mail ballots, which began going out Oct. 5, according to NBC News, which the paper could not independently confirm. Federal law generally bars systematic changes to voter lists within 90 days of a federal election, and Election Day is Nov. 3.

The administration’s strongest argument is simple: only citizens may vote in federal elections, and holding questionable ballots aside until citizenship is confirmed, rather than discarding them, could protect the integrity of the count without disenfranchising anyone. Election officials and voting-rights experts respond that a hastily assembled list, delivered weeks before an election and unverified by the agencies that keep the rolls, risks sweeping in eligible citizens whose ballots would be frozen through no fault of their own.