Federal lawsuit targets California ballots over alleged noncitizen registrations

On Thursday, the Justice Department sued California in the Central District of California over the handling of mail ballots from voters it alleges are likely noncitizens. It asked a federal judge to halt the tabulation of the mail ballots while citizenship is verified. The lawsuit alleges that about 20,000 California voters are likely noncitizens.

The federal list cited by the Justice Department was developed, according to the complaint, through a review by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security Investigations. USCIS used third-party software to identify possible matches in voter-roll information and sorted them by confidence. Homeland Security Investigations then conducted a further review. The filing acknowledges that voter-roll information typically does not contain complete information about a person. The lawsuit says Homeland Security Investigations reasonably believes about 20,000 likely noncitizens are registered to vote in California.

Separately from the lawsuit, Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter sent California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County election official Dean Logan letters setting a 48-hour period to review the federal list, ending at noon Thursday. McCotter said the department would seek emergency relief if California did not implement its requested process by that deadline. The department also accused California of failing to cooperate seriously with federal efforts to identify noncitizens on its voter rolls.

Under the Justice Department's requested process, officials would segregate — rather than cancel — ballots associated with listed voters whose citizenship could not be confirmed. Signature verification or counting for those ballots would be suspended until citizenship was established.

Mail ballots, which every registered California voter receives, began going out on October 5. Axios reported that the federal action could delay ballots from eligible Californians mistakenly flagged as noncitizens and trigger a court fight close to Election Day.

The Justice Department's legal argument and federal list.

Federal law bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections. The Justice Department says its request should be uncontroversial because it seeks to prevent conduct that is already a federal crime. The Justice Department argues that California's actions conflict with the federal prohibition on noncitizens voting in federal elections and are preempted under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause.

In a separate multistate inquiry, Axios and The Hill reported that a preliminary federal review matched fewer than half the government's claimed total. That reporting does not resolve the California-specific allegation in the complaint.

California officials challenge the list and requested process.

Weber says the demands rely on unverifiable or unsubstantiated information and lack legal authority. She says California sought the methodology and data supporting earlier federal claims but received neither. Weber also says the current list lacks usable detail, even as the department demands action affecting thousands of voters shortly before the election.

Los Angeles County received a password-protected thumb drive containing names from the federal list but did not access it. Logan said accessing the device would conflict with security and data-privacy protocols. He said laws require any eligibility removal to rest on verifiable information rather than unconfirmed data matching.

Weber's and Logan's objections focus on whether the list provides verifiable information and legal authority for acting on it. The prohibition on noncitizen voting is distinct from the unresolved legality of the Justice Department's requested verification and ballot-handling process. NBC News reports that federal law prohibits systematic voter-list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election. The article does not establish whether that restriction governs the requested verification and ballot-handling process. Roll Call reported that the lawsuit does not cite a statute imposing an additional citizenship-verification requirement on voters.

Political and legal response

Governor Gavin Newsom described the lawsuit as an attempt to suppress California voters before Election Day. He said the administration was demanding that election officials violate federal law.

Attorneys with the UCLA Voting Rights Project characterize the department's planned use of the list — which the Justice Department says would segregate rather than cancel ballots — as a systematic voter purge less than a month before the election. They argue that compiling the list and using it in that way violate established law and the National Voter Registration Act.

The group said it would seek a temporary restraining order unless the department abandoned the requested verification and ballot-handling process.