DOJ Takes California to Court Over Potential Noncitizen Voting

The Trump administration wants uncooperative officials in so-called sanctuary states to know it’s serious about noncitizen voting. The Department of Justice demanded California either verify the citizenship of more than 20,000 registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens or agree to hold out their ballots until they can be verified. Golden State election officials were given 48 hours to comply. They refused. The timer hit zero on Thursday, October 15, and the DOJ filed suit in federal court.

Noncitizen Voting – Noncompliance or a Nonissue?

The DOJ asked a federal judge on Thursday to issue an injunction preventing election officials from counting the ballots of thousands of voters identified as potential noncitizens until their status could be verified. The lawsuit was filed in the name of the United States and against Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, and the state of California itself.

The battle at the moment – at least as far as the narrative is concerned – isn’t about whether noncitizens should be allowed to vote in federal elections. It’s about whether any of them actually are and whether the government’s request violates the sovereignty of California to handle its own business.

US Attorney General Todd Blanche called California’s refusal to cooperate “state-facilitated voter fraud” in a statement. Before the lawsuit was filed, Weber said in a statement of her own: “The USDOJ’s relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections.”

“This is nothing more than their ongoing, dangerous, reckless, scorched-earth, widespread attempt to advance conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud that doesn’t exist,” California AG Rob Bonta said in a news conference.

On Tuesday, Acting Deputy US Attorney General Trent McCotter sent a letter to CA Secretary of State Weber, informing her that federal officials had provided Los Angeles County officials with a list of individuals whom authorities believe are noncitizens. He warned the Golden State had 48 hours to verify the citizenship of those on the list and to withhold their ballots until done. “If you cannot implement this process by then, given the ongoing federal election, the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief,” the letter explained.

Weber responded in a statement on Wednesday. “In July of this year, President Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin made (still) unsubstantiated claims that California had 190,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls,” she said. “Given the many high-profile examples of states purging U.S. citizens from their voter rolls based on DHS/SAVE data, SOS immediately requested written information about their methodology and data sources to back up their claims. They refused and provided California with nothing.”

As for the list of names, LA County Registrar Logan refused to even open the file.

Battle of the Narratives

Back in July, DHS flagged more than 256,000 registered voters in four states as potential noncitizens, including, as Weber pointed out, more than 190,000 in California. As for methodology, DHS Secretary Mullin said in the letters at the time that the department compared publicly available voter registration records with federal immigration data.

According to the letters, the DHS estimates were perhaps as many as 190,832 in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada, and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Notably, more than 81,000 registered voters in California had names, dates of birth, addresses, and Social Security numbers matching noncitizens in DHS records.

In the filing for Thursday’s lawsuit, the DOJ said it was confident that California had mailed ballots to more than 20,000 people who are likely noncitizens. State officials question the validity of the numbers. When DHS first sent notice to Nevada of the 16,000 or so suspected noncitizen registered voters, state officials argued that DHS revised its list to 185 and that all were eventually verified as citizens. It’s worth noting, however, that DHS later denied cutting the list down to 185 and that there were still more than 14,000 under review.

But even if verification cleared every suspected noncitizen voter, that’s the exact process the Trump administration is asking for. The request, the subsequent deadline, and the lawsuit weren’t to remove 20,000 or more Californians from the voter rolls; they were to verify that they’re actually qualified citizens in light of the fact that there’s some data suggesting they aren’t. Even if their ballots are held out of the initial vote count, it’s only until their citizenship can be verified. No actual US citizen loses the right to vote here.

Still, Golden State officials refuse. They point out that, by state and federal laws, California prohibits noncitizen voting already – and that they do audit their own voter rolls. 

Motor Voter Mania and the Margin of Error

But what’s the margin of error, and who’s there to audit the auditors? California has a system colloquially called motor voter. Under this system, whenever someone gets a driver’s license – or whenever an underage licensee turns 18 – they’re registered to vote automatically unless they answer “no” on the US citizen question or opt out of registration. The state also automatically mails absentee ballots to everyone on the rolls, a process that began October 5 this year.

There are millions of licensed drivers in California who aren’t US citizens. Most of them are legal residents, but more than a million are “undocumented” folks covered under the AB 60 license process. Allegedly, these AB 60 applicants are never given the opportunity to register to vote. And, also allegedly, when someone applies for or renews a driver’s license or submits a change of address, the motor voter process stops them if they answer that they aren’t US citizens.

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The problem, however, is that the system doesn’t always work. In 2018, the California Department of Motor Vehicles admitted that the motor voter system generated as many as 77,000 duplicate registration forms. Then, a few months later, the department announced that about 23,000 inaccurate registrations were created, including wrong party designations, erroneous requests for mail-in ballots, and even registrations for people who had opted out entirely. Finally, that same year, the DMV revealed that about 1,500 people who weren’t eligible to vote – including noncitizens – were wrongly registered because of employee errors.

Then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla said his office canceled the invalid registrations as soon as he learned of them, but that he couldn’t be sure whether any of the wrongly registered people had voted in that year’s primary.

So, there are millions of licensed drivers who, for one reason or another, aren’t eligible to vote in the Golden State. There’s a proven history of motor voter mayhem. And there’s a list of at least 20,000 people – perhaps many, many more if the earlier estimate is anywhere close to accurate – who at least seem to be registered to vote while not actually being US citizens.

And state officials are refusing the federal government’s request to guard against illegal noncitizen voting – not by purging them from the rolls, but by verifying their citizenship status before counting their ballots. The actual number of noncitizens registered to vote could be zero just as well as it could be 20,000. But in a flawed system, where both software and employee errors have proven to cause erroneous records before – never mind the potential for a noncitizen to register either by accident or through willing fraud –  why are state and local officials so reluctant to even look for themselves?