Vote Early, and Make Washington Prove Its Case Before Any Ballot Is Set Aside

On Saturday, people in New York, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas and thousands of smaller places spent the afternoon doing something more useful than chanting. Under the No Kings banner, organizers walked people to ballot drop boxes, helped them check their registrations and urged them to make a plan to vote early. With the midterms barely two weeks away, that is exactly the right instinct, and it should not belong to one side.

The reason it feels urgent is the Justice Department’s lawsuit against California. On a Tuesday three weeks before Election Day, federal officials handed Los Angeles County a thumb drive listing about 20,000 registered voters they called likely noncitizens, with the password reportedly on a sticky note, and gave the county 48 hours to act. When the county declined to open the drive on security grounds and the state refused to purge voters on that basis, the department sued, asking a court to keep those voters’ mail ballots from being counted until their citizenship is confirmed.

Consider what that request means in practice. Mail ballots are already in voters’ hands. The department has not publicly explained how it built its list, and matching incomplete voter files against imperfect immigration records is known to produce false positives. California’s secretary of state, Shirley Weber, has called the claims unsupported and likely inaccurate. If even a modest share of the people on the list are citizens, the remedy the government seeks would silence lawful voters to catch, at most, a handful of unlawful ones.

The government’s strongest argument deserves a fair hearing: every ballot cast by an ineligible person cancels out one cast by a citizen, and no one should shrug at that. We agree with the goal. Keeping noncitizens off the rolls is the law, and states should take credible evidence seriously. But credible evidence is the point. It means names checked against reliable records, shared securely, with time for election officials to verify them and for voters to respond. It does not mean an ultimatum delivered weeks before an election, built on a method no one outside the department has been allowed to examine.

The record so far does not inspire confidence. NPR reported that the department has lost every decided case in which it sought nonpublic voter roll data, and state election officials say noncitizen voting is rare. The Constitution gives states the primary job of running elections for good reason: it puts the work close to voters and keeps it out of the hands of whoever happens to hold federal power in a given year.

This is also about something larger than one state. Roughly three in 10 ballots in 2024 were cast by mail, according to federal figures cited by Al Jazeera, and far more in Western states. If a federal agency can freeze ballots on the strength of an unexplained list in California, nothing stops a future administration of either party from doing the same in Texas or Florida. Rules that protect voters only work if they protect everyone’s.

So the advice from Saturday’s rallies stands, whoever you support. Check your registration. Vote early if you can, and if you vote by mail, follow your ballot’s tracking and fix any problem while there is still time. The best answer to an effort to cast doubt on lawful ballots is a large, early, well-documented vote, counted in full.