The Justice Department is taking extreme measures to root out what it claims are noncitizen voters less than a month before the midterm elections.
California’s secretary of state received a letter and a password-protected thumb drive on Tuesday from the agency, with a 48-hour countdown to cross-reference a list of names against state voter rolls, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Sun. If California does not comply, the Trump administration signaled that it could seek to block certain ballots from being counted, Reuters first reported.
California, one of at least six states with universal mail-in voting, already began sending out mail-in ballots in early October. The letter from acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, says the DOJ identified voters it “believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a vote-by-mail ballot.” A second, identical letter was sent to Dean Logan, who oversees voting records and the county clerk’s office for Los Angeles County.
The DOJ told The Sun that the letters were sent “to ensure that noncitizens who automatically received ballots per California law do not vote in the upcoming federal election.”
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“This should not be controversial, as the criminal statute is clear: only American citizens may vote in federal elections. It is a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections, and the DOJ is asking California to ensure that is not occurring,” a spokesperson for the department added.
The California secretary of state’s office and the Los Angeles County clerk’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The letter instructs election officials to withhold the ballots of voters on the password-protected list until their citizenship is confirmed. For voters who have already received a ballot, theirs should be “segregated” once it’s returned and not counted until their citizenship is confirmed.
“Usually we would not say that some suspicion of noncitizen voters without any additional verification means that we segregate their ballots,” Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law school professor, told The Sun.
Muller added that segregating ballots is not uncommon, such as setting aside provisional ballots or ballots held up by a court order. But he warned that in this case, a significant number of ballots could be contested in tight elections.
California has been at the center of several fights between state election officials and the Trump administration. The state was a key player in the Supreme Court case that blocked a U.S. Postal Service policy that attempted to change mail-in voting rules.
California was also the recipient of a July letter from the Department of Homeland Security that said the state had as many as 190,832 noncitizens on its voter rolls. A similar letter was sent to Nevada that said the state had nearly 15,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls. DHS later rolled that back to 185 noncitizens, all of whom were found to be lawful citizens.
Tuesday’s letter is a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s quest to change how states conduct their elections.
The DOJ added that it “will have no choice but to seek emergency relief” if California does not comply. Although states control their own elections, it’s unclear so far whether California will push back on the DOJ’s request. Tuesday’s letter acknowledged that “states are responsible for voter registration, and the Federal Government is responsible for maintaining immigration records.”
The California attorney general’s office referred The Sun back to the secretary of state.
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