The Trump administration has taken legal action against California after the state let a deadline pass without reviewing a list of registered noncitizen voters that federal officials had sent to it. The Justice Department filed the lawsuit on Thursday in a US District Court in California. Department officials asked the court to stop the state from counting mail-in ballots cast by voters on that list, which the department said contained 20,000 noncitizens.
The department said it had tried to “work collaboratively” with California to identify noncitizens registered to vote in the state. In its account, however, “California made no serious effort to do so.” The filing marks an escalation in a dispute that has been building over the past several weeks between federal officials and state and county election administrators.
Deadline letters and the state’s response
The lawsuit follows a 48-hour deadline that the department set in letters sent on Tuesday to officials in several California counties. The letters warned of further action if local offices did not review lists of allegedly ineligible voters that the agency said it had shared with them.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the state’s top official responsible for running elections, answered the letters in a three-page reply. She said she wanted to “set the record straight” about events that had taken place since July. Weber argued that the administration was demanding unprecedented measures that could threaten the voting rights of thousands of Californians, based on information or methods it had not explained or provided.
Weber said she had been told that the lists given to local officials contained roughly 20,000 names, but that no list had ever been sent to her office. The department had earlier said it suspected “thousands” of registered voters of being noncitizens. The lawsuit filed on Thursday put the figure at “tens of thousands.” Weber criticised the short timeline, writing that the department was asking the state to review the citizenship status of about 20,000 people on the eve of an election and within 48 hours. “This is an emergency of the DOJ’s creation,” she wrote.
Los Angeles County declines to open a thumb drive
Election officials in Los Angeles County, one of the offices that received the department’s ultimatum, issued a statement on Wednesday. They noted that the threat had been made just 21 days before the midterm elections. The county said it had received a thumb drive along with the letter, as well as a handwritten note that appeared to contain a password. It said it would not try to open the drive because it did not consider the device a secure medium.
The county also said that keeping voter lists accurate was a basic responsibility of its office. It added that state law clearly requires voters to be removed from the rolls only on the basis of verifiable information.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that large numbers of noncitizens, who are not legally allowed to vote in federal elections, are casting ballots in Democratic-led states, including California. State officials, among them California’s, have said that the number of such voters is negligible. They have also argued that the scale of the problem does not justify intervention only weeks before the elections, which are scheduled for November 3.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has strongly criticised the lawsuit. He described it as a “sad, desperate attempt by” Trump to “suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.” In a statement, Newsom said: “Courts have made clear the federal government has no role in running state elections.” He added that the state would defend free and fair elections and oppose any authoritarian effort to undermine democracy.
Trump has long falsely claimed that noncitizen voting cost him the 2020 election, blaming Democrats for it. The reporting notes that the problem is very rare.
Court rulings and the fight over mail-in voting
Earlier this month, a federal judge in Florida ruled that a federal law making it a crime for noncitizens to vote was unconstitutional. The ruling was a significant setback for the administration’s efforts to pursue such cases against individuals. The judge said that under the US Constitution, only individual states have the power to set voter qualifications. Each state had already made such voting a crime for anyone who is not a citizen, so it was up to the states to prosecute those cases. The Justice Department has at least 45 such cases pending across the country, and the accused could now raise the same objection that succeeded in Florida.
Another federal judge ruled this month that the Justice Department had acted unlawfully when it sought state voter rolls to cross-check them against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. The administration has often promoted that database as a tool for identifying ineligible voters. However, numerous reports have found it to be inaccurate and capable of flagging citizens as noncitizens. The judge said that forcing states to use such a database would be unconstitutional.
In September, the US Supreme Court rejected a Trump administration effort to restrict mail-in ballots for the November 3 elections. Trump had argued that mail-in ballots were especially open to misuse by noncitizens because states were failing to verify who was sending them. Two dozen Democratic-led states have filed lawsuits against the administration over its attempts to limit mail-in voting. These include an executive order directing federal agencies, such as the US Postal Service, not to handle mail-in ballots unless the eligibility of those casting them has been verified.
According to the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan government agency, around 30 percent of all ballots cast in the 2024 elections were sent by mail. Mail voting is even more common in several western states, including California.
