Donald Trump's Justice Department has given election officials in all 58 California counties 48 hours to help identify suspected noncitizens on the voter rolls and set aside their mail ballots — warning that officials who keep processing them could face criminal prosecution.
The letters, sent on Friday by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, landed 11 days before the November 3 midterm elections, with voting already underway and more than 330,000 California mail ballots already counted.
"Aiders and abettors to a federal crime"
The letters include county-by-county lists drawn from a wider federal list of more than 20,000 people the Justice Department alleges are noncitizens registered to vote in California. Orange County was told to check 1,754 names, Riverside 1,355, San Bernardino 1,133, Ventura 334, Santa Barbara 180, San Luis Obispo 63, and Contra Costa 407 people described as "likely aliens."
The demand is blunt. For anyone whose citizenship cannot be confirmed, counties are told to "immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate — not cancel — those individuals' vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined." If a ballot has already been returned, it should not be processed until citizenship is established.
The letters also ask registrars to hand over voters' Social Security numbers, identification details and copies of their registrations.
And they carry a threat. Bill Essayli, First Assistant US Attorney for the Central District of California, who signed the letters, warned that officials who knowingly count such ballots "risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime." In an interview, he put it more directly: "Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy."
California pushes back: the lists are unreliable
State and county officials say the federal lists have not been shown to be reliable — and point to what happened in Nevada, where an initial list of 15,900 flagged registrants was narrowed to 185 "confirmed" cases, and every one of them turned out to be a US citizen.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber's office has said the government has not explained its matching method well enough to justify holding ballots. At least 18 counties had confirmed receiving the letters by Saturday, according to the Los Angeles County registrar's office, though Essayli said they went to every county in the state.
Senator Alex Padilla of California called the move election interference. "This is NOT A DRILL: Donald Trump and Todd Blanche are trying to interfere in California elections," he said in a statement.
A lawsuit already in court
The letters are the latest escalation in a fight that began earlier this month. On October 13, the Justice Department demanded Los Angeles County and Weber hand over voter data, then sued California and Los Angeles County seeking to block the counting of ballots tied to the more than 20,000 flagged names. A hearing in that lawsuit is scheduled for Tuesday.
On Friday, the administration also asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene before the district judge rules, setting a deadline of Saturday.
The White House has also pushed federal agencies to speed up reviews of at least 47 state voter rolls obtained by the Department of Homeland Security, according to an internal email seen by Reuters. And the Justice Department has ramped up prosecutions of people accused of voting while not holding US citizenship.
The Justice Department says it is seeking verification, not a purge — the ballots are to be set aside, not cancelled, and registrations are not being revoked. But with the 48-hour clock running over the weekend, county registrars are caught between a federal warning of criminal exposure and California's own election procedures — and the ballots already in the mail keep coming.
Reporting based on Reuters, the New York Times, the Associated Press, Democracy Docket and Voice of Nigeria.