The Justice Department has threatened to sue California over claims that noncitizens remain on the state's voter rolls, giving state election officials 48 hours to review a list of flagged names or face federal legal action ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
Letters reviewed by Reuters and sent by acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber accompanied a password-protected thumb drive delivered to Los Angeles County containing names the department believes belong to noncitizens who received ballots. The letters demanded that California withhold ballots from the listed voters until their citizenship is confirmed, and that officials decline to count any ballots already returned by those voters unless they can verify eligibility.
If the state does not comply, the department warned it "will have no choice but to seek emergency relief" in court, according to Democracy Docket. A Justice Department spokesperson said "federal law is clear: only American citizens may vote in federal elections," though the department has not said how the list was compiled or publicly detailed the number of names involved. As of Friday, no lawsuit had been filed; the dispute remains at the ultimatum stage.
California began mailing ballots to its more than 20 million registered voters on Oct. 5 under the state's universal vote-by-mail system. The Justice Department's letter follows a July announcement from the Department of Homeland Security naming California among four states in its search for noncitizen voters, when Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed, without detailing his evidence, that more than 190,000 noncitizens were registered in the state. Weber said at the time she had "serious doubts about the reliability" of the federal data.
The threat is the latest move in a broader Justice Department campaign that has sued roughly 30 states and the District of Columbia for voter-roll data this year, a string of cases the department has largely lost so far in court, including an earlier challenge in California. Voting-rights advocates note that the administration's noncitizen-voter searches have at times mistakenly flagged voters who are, in fact, eligible to cast ballots.
