LOS ANGELES, California — The U.S. Department of Justice sued California on Thursday after the state refused a demand to review a federal list of roughly 20,000 registered voters the department says are likely noncitizens who were mailed live ballots, according to CNN.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, asks a judge to stop the state from counting vote-by-mail ballots returned by people on the list until their citizenship can be verified, according to the complaint described by CNN. Federal law makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote in a federal election, and the department argues that mailing and counting ballots without that check facilitates unlawful voting.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said California was given 48 hours to review and flag the names and refused, according to his public statement on the filing. The department said the names were identified by cross-checking voter rolls against immigration records and other data held by agencies including U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security Investigations, with matches classed by confidence level, according to CNN.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber rejected the demand in a letter on October 15, according to CNN. She said the federal list lacked the detail needed for investigative use, noted that an earlier federal claim in July had alleged far larger numbers without providing data or methodology, and warned that the requested steps risked disenfranchising registered voters on the basis of unverified claims.
Weber also pointed to the National Voter Registration Act, which restricts systematic voter-list maintenance in the 90 days before a federal election, and to California law requiring ballots to be mailed to registered voters. She said her office would review evidence of ineligible voters and act in compliance with state and federal law, according to CNN.
Legal experts quoted by CNN were skeptical of the suit. One voting-rights professor described the legal theory as unclear and the case as exceptionally difficult for the department to win, and analysts noted that similar federal claims in other states shrank sharply after closer review, with one state saying names supplied after further checks appeared in its records to be citizens. Those examples underline the central dispute: how reliable the federal matching is.
The case lands less than three weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, with early and mail voting already underway. California is the most populous state and mails ballots to all registered voters, so an emergency order, if granted, could affect how thousands of returned ballots are handled and could invite similar actions elsewhere.
What happens next is a fast court fight over emergency relief. The state is expected to oppose the request, and any ruling will need to arrive quickly enough to give county officials clear instructions before ballots are tabulated. Zark News is treating the size and accuracy of the federal list as a department claim that has not been independently verified.
