DOJ Sues California to Stop Counting Ballots from 20,000 Likely Noncitizens

The Justice Department sued California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan on Thursday, asking a federal court to block the state from counting vote-by-mail ballots cast by more than 20,000 people the department believes are likely noncitizens.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, follows letters sent Tuesday by Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter. Those letters gave California and Los Angeles County officials 48 hours to review a password-protected thumb drive containing the names and to segregate any returned ballots until citizenship could be confirmed. Officials did not comply. In a letter to McCotter, Weber described the demand as an “emergency of the DOJ’s creation” and said the state would continue to follow applicable law rather than “unsubstantiated claims.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement announcing the suit: “State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America. If found responsible in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated laws that protect our nation’s representative system of government.”

The complaint alleges that California made no serious effort to work with the federal government to identify noncitizens on the rolls after earlier requests for data. It seeks an order preventing officials from tabulating ballots from individuals on the federal list until citizenship is determined, and from sending additional ballots to them. More than 732,000 Californians have already voted, according to Political Data Inc.

Governor Gavin Newsom called the filing a “sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli told reporters the list and the lawsuit resulted from California’s refusal to share voter information with the administration.

Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. The Justice Department has emphasized that the suit does not seek a purge of the rolls or cancellation of votes already cast by confirmed citizens, but rather temporary segregation of the ballots in question pending verification. The case arrives less than three weeks before the November 3 midterms, with early voting underway.