Justice Department asks California to prove citizenship for voter rolls or withhold ballots

The U.S. Justice Department has stepped up its campaign of pressure on California election officials to uncover allegations of voter fraud before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, demanding that officials statewide prove the U.S. citizenship of thousands of voters flagged by the federal government as potential noncitizens, or withhold or void their ballots.

Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. R. Trent McCotter made the request — which experts called highly questionable at a time when votes are already underway — in letters Tuesday to state elections officials, including California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/Clerk’s Office.

The letters, reviewed by The Times, call on state officials to respond to the Justice Department within 48 hours.

McCotter wrote that the Justice Department provided Logan’s office with “a password-protected USB drive containing a list of names that the federal government believes are likely noncitizens who received an absentee ballot” for the Nov. 3 election.

“We ask that you review the list within 48 hours to determine if any citizens are listed. For those individuals whose citizenship status you cannot independently confirm, we ask that you immediately ask the appropriate election officials to segregate – not void – those individuals’ absentee ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” McCotter wrote to Weber and Logan.

The demand letter came from the Acting Assistant United States Attorney. Gen. R. Trent McCotter, pictured attending a news conference last month in Washington.

(Finn Gomez/Getty Images)

Federally registered voters who have not yet received a ballot should not receive one until their citizenship is verified, while ballots already returned by registered voters should not be counted until their citizenship is verified, McCotter wrote.

Weber’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Logan said his office was reviewing the Justice Department’s letter in coordination with Weber and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, but had not accessed the USB drive because state officials “do not consider the device to be a secure medium” and access to its contents “would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols.”

He said maintaining accurate voter records is a core responsibility of his office, but that federal and state laws “are clear about how voter eligibility is established — and any action to strip a voter of eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not unconfirmed data matching claims.”

Weber has previously questioned the basis of a claim by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in July that there could be more than 190,000 non-citizen voters on California’s rolls, and rejected offers from the Trump administration to work with his office to purge state polls of those ineligible voters before November, without additional information on how she reached her conclusions.

Similar lists from the Trump administration have been found in other states to be significantly inaccurate and include many voters who are actually citizens. Election experts say that makes the request to California — where ballots have already been mailed — even more concerning.

“One has to ask why the DOJ would violate its own election investigation rules as Election Day approaches, and more than a week after knowing the state had already mailed out the ballots, especially when its past assertions were full of errors,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Becker noted that the Trump administration claimed there were nearly 16,000 registered non-citizens in Nevada, then reduced that number to 185 after further review, and then determined they were all in fact citizens.

A Justice Department spokesperson, in a statement to the Times, defended the agency’s requests to California, saying they “should not be controversial, because the criminal code is clear: Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. It is a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections, and the DOJ is asking California to ensure that this does not happen.”

The spokesperson said the agency was unable to provide the exact number of voters whose citizenship is in question, but that it is in the thousands.

California Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber speaks at the California Democratic Party’s 2025 state convention at the Anaheim Convention Center, May 31, 2025.

(Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press)

McCotter wrote that if Weber cannot implement his requests on how to segregate ballots and verify the citizenship of voters on the federal roll, the Justice Department “will have no choice but to request emergency relief” — an apparent reference to court intervention.

McCotter copied the letters First Assistant US Atty. Bill Essayli, Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor, whose office has already sent Logan’s office a series of grand jury subpoenas regarding individual voter records as part of a criminal investigation into illegal voting.

Essayli’s office referred questions to the Justice Department. Bonta’s office referred questions to Weber and Logan.

Rick Hasen, director of the Saving Democracy Project at UCLA Law, said he “wasn’t aware of anything like this happening this close to an election,” and that it might actually be illegal under the National Voter Registration Act, which “prevents systematic voter purges 90 days before the election.”

He said that whether this ban against purges applies to the deportation of non-citizens is a question that is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, in an Arizona case that the high court will hear in December, but that the Justice Department’s actions strike him as “legally questionable.”

Hasen said “the goal of this 90-day rule is to prevent the inadvertent disenfranchisement of eligible voters by mistake in the rush before the election,” and that this risk is heightened by inaccuracies in similar lists submitted by the Trump administration in other states. “So if there is an attempt to go to court – if the DOJ tries to sue over this – they might have a hard time convincing a judge that this is something the registrar must do or even can do.”

The fact that elections officials are already busy receiving and preprocessing ballots would only strengthen the state’s position in such a case, Hasen said.

“It’s obviously not an opportune time,” he said. “And given that the lists have been found to be wildly inaccurate, at least in other states, this could send the registrar on a wild goose chase when he has more relevant things to do in the election.”

But it may be “chaos” that is to blame, Hasen said. “This is potentially another example of the DOJ making the work of state and local election administrators – which is already difficult and stressful enough – even more difficult,” he said.

Lawyers with UCLA’s Voting Rights Project filed a lawsuit last month on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo, in which they challenged the Trump administration’s use of unproven federal databases to claim that registered California voters are not citizens.

On Wednesday, they told the Justice Department they would seek emergency relief from such practices, given McCotter’s letters.

“The federal government’s attempt to pressure California election officials to act on lists that could misidentify eligible voters constitutes an alarming abuse of power as election season begins. It puts our communities and our basic rights at risk,” said Carl Bergquist, attorney for CHIRLA.

The Justice Department has announced scattered arrests of suspected non-citizen voters across the country in recent weeks, and Trump administration officials — including Essayli — have pointed to the arrests as evidence that non-citizens were voting illegally.

Such votes are happening, Hasen said, but after months of the administration’s aggressive pursuit of such voters, the relatively small number of arrests “belies the assertion that this is a widespread” or criminal phenomenon, with most of the few cases identified being the result of “administrative error or misunderstanding” rather than an intention to vote illegally.

In his letters to Weber and Logan, McCotter wrote that allowing “non-citizens to vote voids citizens’ votes” and that tracking illegal non-citizen voters is a joint responsibility of state and federal authorities.

“States are responsible for voter registration and the federal government is responsible for maintaining immigration records to enable citizenship verification,” he wrote. “By working together, we can more effectively protect against voter dilution and promote election integrity. »