Prosecute Illegal Voting, but Do Not Use It as a Reason to Shelve 20,000 Ballots

On Monday the Justice Department announced charges against 28 green card holders in California accused of registering or voting illegally, and arrested 11 of them. If the evidence holds up in court, those defendants broke the law, and prosecuting them is a legitimate use of federal power. Nobody who cares about elections should argue otherwise.

But the arrests did not arrive on their own. They came days after the same department sued California to stop the counting of mail ballots sent to roughly 20,000 people the federal government has labeled likely noncitizens, until each person’s status is confirmed. The department’s own acting deputy attorney general says that number is only a floor. And on Friday, the department warned Los Angeles County officials that election workers who knowingly process such ballots could be prosecuted as accomplices.

Put those pieces together and the message to voters is plain: your ballot may be held back because your name appeared on a list you cannot see, compiled by a government that has not shown its work. California’s secretary of state says the administration has offered no evidence for its claim. The Los Angeles County registrar says the department is relying on unverified eligibility data. Those objections deserve a hearing before any ballot is set aside, not after.

Scale matters here. The Associated Press notes that research has consistently found noncitizen voting to be rare, hard to prove and not shown to swing results. The department says it has charged about 90 people with election misconduct this year, about 50 of them for voting as noncitizens. More than 227 million Americans were registered to vote in 2024. A small number of prosecutions, however justified, does not show that 20,000 Californians cast illegal ballots, and the department has not claimed it does.

The administration’s defenders make a fair point: every illegal vote cancels out a lawful one, and states should keep their rolls clean. We agree. That is exactly why the right tools are careful list maintenance, verification well before Election Day and prosecution of individuals with evidence in hand. A blanket hold on ballots weeks before an election, built on a database the state was given 48 hours to review, is a blunt instrument that is far more likely to stop eligible citizens, including naturalized citizens whose records lag, than to catch lawbreakers.

There is also the matter of who is doing the threatening. Election workers are mostly local civil servants and temporary staff. Warning them that processing the wrong envelope could bring a federal investigation invites hesitation and delay at the moment when they most need to work quickly and by the rules. That warning should never have been sent.

The courts should require the government to show, name by name, why a ballot should be set aside, and they should do it fast. California’s voters, and the officials counting their ballots, are owed that much. Meanwhile, the best answer for eligible voters is the simplest one: vote, follow your county’s instructions, and track your ballot. The integrity of an election is measured by whether every lawful vote is counted, not only by how many people are charged.