Doj Demands California Review Voting Rolls In Two Days, Threatens Legal Action

The Department of Justice threatened potential legal action against California over the state’s voting rolls, the latest move by the Trump administration to assert control over states’ election administration ahead of the midterms.

In separate letters to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, the top election official for Los Angeles County, the Department of Justice on Tuesday gave California officials 48 hours to review a thumb drive it says contains the names of undocumented people who may be registered to vote in the November midterm elections, threatening litigation if the state cannot meet its Thursday deadline.

“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,” Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter wrote in the letters, which were shared by the DOJ with POLITICO on Wednesday.

Weber and Logan’s offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the federal government’s demands, which were first reported by Reuters.

In his letters, McCotter asked the state to segregate and hold off on tabulating already-returned ballots from listed voters it could not verify as citizens, and to refrain from sending ballots to listed individuals who had not yet received one.

“Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” he wrote. “States are responsible for voter registration, and the Federal Government is responsible for maintaining immigration records to enable verification of citizenship. Working together, we can more effectively protect against voter dilution and promote election integrity.”

The DOJ letters did not lay out a methodology for how it determined who it believed were noncitizens registered to vote, nor did it say how many people it was targeting. A spokesperson confirmed the veracity of the letters but did not immediately answer questions on its methodology.

“This should not be controversial, as the criminal statute is clear: only American citizens may vote in federal elections,” DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels said in a statement. “It is a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections, and the DOJ is asking California to ensure that is not occurring.”

The Trump administration has looked to exercise an unusual amount of control over states’ voting rolls, and has sued 30 states and D.C. — including California — for not handing over access to voters’ records.

Voting rolls are maintained by individual states, with little to no input from the federal government. Federal courts have been almost universally skeptical of the Trump administration’s lawsuits, with the administration losing 26 times, according to a tracker maintained by the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning think tank and advocacy group.

The letters come amid a public effort to arrest non-citizens accused of voting in previous elections. In recent weeks, the Justice Department has charged dozens of undocumented individuals across the country for allegedly illegally voting. But the law the government is using was deemed unconstitutional by a judge in early October, owing to concerns that it ran afoul of states’ rights.

Election experts generally believe that noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare, and does not occur on the scope that President Donald Trump — who regularly claims millions of illegal voters exist — and his administration alleges.

Trump also led an ill-fated push to rewrite the country’s vote-by-mail rules just before the election, which the Supreme Court blocked in September.