WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to order California to set aside mail ballots tied to about 20,000 registered voters whom federal agencies say are likely noncitizens, in a case that has become the sharpest legal fight yet over how far Washington can intervene in a state-run election less than two weeks before the November 3 midterms, according to court filings reported by USA Today and public media.
The department sued California on October 15 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, after giving state and Los Angeles County officials 48 hours to act on a list of more than 20,000 names. Federal lawyers say U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security Investigations compared California voter-registration records with federal immigration data and identified the voters with what the complaint calls high confidence after a multiagency review.
“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement announcing the suit. The department is not asking the court to cancel registrations or discard ballots already cast. It is asking that ballots from flagged voters be segregated and held until citizenship can be verified, either by the state on its own or working with federal officials, before those votes are counted in federal races.
California officials pushed back in court filings on Tuesday, arguing that the federal list is unreliable and that carrying out the demand this close to the election would be unfeasible and could break federal and state election law. “At best, this litigation is a reckless political stunt,” the state wrote. “At worst, it threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians this election.”
Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan told the court that only 7,035 of the roughly 20,000 names had addresses in Los Angeles County and that some entries were duplicates. In a preliminary check, county officials sampled 200 names from the federal list and found that many registrations were canceled or inactive, and that about 39 percent of those with a usable birthplace entry listed a birthplace in the United States — a result county officials say shows the federal matching cannot be reliably verified by election staff, according to the filings.
The dispute widened this week when federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against 28 lawful permanent residents in California for alleged illegal registration or voting, saying those cases came from names on the federal list. Justice Department lawyers cited the charges in support of their request to segregate the flagged ballots. The department also told the court that USCIS is still processing a separate batch of about 17,000 additional records, a figure officials describe as an early tally that is still under review.
Voting-rights groups and national Democrats have sued in Washington, arguing that the administration is overreaching with lists they say were compiled from error-prone data matching. Election experts note that cross-matching voter rolls against immigration and commercial databases has produced false positives in past efforts, and federal law limits changes to voter rolls in the 90 days before an election. A separate federal ruling this week restricted some Homeland Security voter-fraud investigative methods in nine states, citing unreliable citizenship data.
California mails a ballot to every registered voter, and voting in the midterms is already underway in the state, which is why the timing of any court order matters. If a judge orders segregation, county workers would have to identify and hold the flagged ballots during counting, a process state officials say they cannot complete reliably before Election Day. If the court refuses, the ballots will be counted as usual while the underlying lawsuit continues.
The court is expected to weigh competing emergency motions on an accelerated schedule before the election. For voters, the case will decide whether a federal data match — one the state says flags some U.S.-born citizens — can hold up the counting of mail ballots in the nation’s most populous state. Zark News will update this story as the court rules. Read the state’s response as reported by KVCR / NPR and the original lawsuit coverage from USA Today.
