Trump administration sues California to block counting of alleged non-citizen mail-in ballots

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The Trump administration sued California election officials Thursday, asking a judge to bar the state from counting mail-in ballots for next month’s midterm elections from people the federal government has identified as “probable” noncitizens until their status can be confirmed.

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The lawsuit comes after the Justice Department said California officials failed to meet a 48-hour deadline to review a password-protected USB drive that contains a list of 20,000 names that the federal government says are likely noncitizens who received ballots to participate in the Nov. 3 election. The state mails ballots to all registered voters. A senior Justice Department official sent a letter earlier this week threatening possible legal action if California did not comply.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said in a letter to the Justice Department that the federal government has provided no evidence to support its claim that 20,000 names on the state’s voter rolls belong to noncitizens. She referenced a case in which the federal government claimed that nearly 16,000 would-be noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada, but the state determined that all were, in fact, U.S. citizens.

She also noted that voting was already underway in the state. Weber, a Democrat, said the Justice Department was “demanding unprecedented measures that threaten the voting rights of thousands of Californians, based on unverifiable information or methodology that you still fail to explain or provide.”

California’s elections are “fully compliant” with federal law, she added.

Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan said in a statement that his office received the letter and USB drive this week, along with a “handwritten note providing a password” to access the list of suspected non-citizens registered to vote. He said he did not consider the USB stick to be a secure device. The Secretary of State’s office said the password was written “on a sticky note.”

The Justice Department’s lawsuit says the federal government sought to “work cooperatively” with California to identify noncitizens registered to vote in the state, and that “California has made no serious effort to do so.”

“The United States thus seeks to obtain trivial electoral relief when a vote is called into question,” the lawsuit states. “This Court should enjoin California from currently tabulating the absentee ballots of potential non-citizens in the upcoming federal election until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” the lawsuit states.

Weber, who is named in the suit, suggested that the federal government’s outreach efforts have not been collaborative.

She said that over the summer, the Department of Homeland Security claimed California had 190,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls, but declined to provide the methodology or data sources when asked by the bureau.

In her letter Thursday, she called the recent requests an “emergency creation by the DOJ.”

The letter sent by Acting Assistant Attorney General Trent McCotter gave the state 48 hours to research the list of 20,000 people he said might not be citizens. For those whose citizenship cannot be independently verified, the state should direct local election officials to separate their absentee ballots until their status can be determined, and not provide a ballot to anyone who has not yet received one.

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California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in an unrelated news conference Thursday morning that state officials would not carry out federal requests to withhold ballots from presumed non-citizen voters. He noted that the presumed number of noncitizens registered to vote in the state had fallen from 190,000 reported over the summer by the Department of Homeland Security to the 20,000 noted by the Justice Department.

“What happened to those 170,000 people? They were just wrong,” Bonta said.

Bonta also said the Trump administration was violating a federal law that prohibits states from changing voter rolls within 90 days of an election.

“They are in unprecedented, baseless and lawless territory,” he said.

The Trump administration has made chasing non-citizen voters a priority this year, even though the problem is exceptionally rare. The Justice Department has charged about 90 people with various types of election misconduct so far this year, including 50 who allegedly voted as noncitizens. There were more than 227 million registered voters in the United States in the 2024 presidential election.

Austin reported from Sacramento, California, and Riddle from Los Angeles.