The Justice Department sued the state of California on Thursday over allegations that election officials sent mail-in ballots to noncitizen voters.
The DOJ is asking the court to issue a permanent preliminary injunction that blocks the state from counting the votes of over 20,000 people who Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have identified as potential noncitizen voters. In July, the Department of Homeland Security told state officials that the state’s voter rolls included as many as 190,832 noncitizens.
“By sending ballots to likely noncitizens despite the Federal Government notifying California of serious concerns, Defendants (collectively, California) have made it nearly impossible for the United States to investigate and enforce federal law,” the DOJ argued.
The lawsuit comes after California election officials were given 48 hours to comply with a letter from Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter. That letter came with a password-protected thumb drive that listed 20,000 people the department “believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a vote-by-mail ballot.”
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The password, said California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, was on a sticky note attached to the thumb drive.
California election officials were then instructed to hold on to the ballots of people listed or set aside completed ballots received by people on the thumb drive until their citizenship could be verified. The DOJ threatened on Tuesday that if California did not comply, the government “will have no choice but to seek emergency relief.”
But election officials in California have resisted the federal government’s push to exert control over the state’s vote-by-mail process.
“Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established — and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching,” Dean Logan, who leads the Los Angeles County clerk’s office and received one of Tuesday’s letters from the DOJ, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Weber said she sees the move as a tactic for the DOJ to “cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections.”
“California has robust state law requirements that only U.S. citizens can register to vote and that any non-eligible registrants are removed from the State’s voter rolls,” she said in a news release on Wednesday.
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