Orange County leaders this week declined to direct their top elections official to release sensitive voter data to the Department of Justice after the agency sued for the information in June.
Republican Supervisors Don Wagner and Janet Nguyen on Tuesday sought support from the rest of the board to comply with the federal government’s request to turn over voter registration records of 17 individuals who were ineligible to cast a ballot but had appeared on the county’s voter registration rolls.
Instead, a majority of the board voted against the request, with several noting they preferred to let a judge decide whether the information should ultimately be released.
The vote, county lawyers said, wouldn’t be enough to force the county registrar to turn over any information anyway since the county isn’t named in the lawsuit. But experts say the move signals a willingness in this onetime conservative stronghold to push back against the Trump administration’s attempts to expand federal power and seek sensitive information on individuals.
“It’s a little bit of posturing of whether or not there is allegiance to the Trump administration [by] obeying in advance,” said Jodi Balma, a political science professor at Fullerton College. “The reality is, nobody’s dying on the hill of 17 voter registrations.”
The Trump administration has begun to ramp up scrutiny of how the country’s elections are carried out, particularly in relation to noncitizen voting.
The Justice Department has sent letters to at least 26 states requesting details about voters, election administrative processes and election officials. Many of those states received specific requests for statewide voter registration lists.
Wagner said in an interview on Thursday that he didn’t see any upside to Orange County fighting the federal government on this issue, especially during a time when California, in particular, is under intense scrutiny by the Trump administration.
“It does appear the the governor and the president are trying to score rhetorical points against each other,” Wagner said, “and the president has already said to all these sanctuary jurisdictions in California that he’s trying to withhold money from them.
“We’ve been the whipping boy at the state and federal levels,” he added, “and I just don’t want to be caught in the middle of this.”
The lawsuit, filed against the county’s registrar of voters, stems from a June 2 letter the Justice Department sent to county election officials seeking information on people who had been removed from voter rolls beginning in January 2020 because they weren’t eligible to cast a ballot. The lawsuit states that federal officials were responding to a complaint made by the relative of a noncitizen who received a mail-in ballot.
The county responded by sending information on 17 individuals, including their names and addresses, who either self-reported being noncitizens or whose ineligibility was confirmed by the Orange County district attorney’s office. Those individuals were removed from the voter rolls.
Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer told the Board of Supervisors during Tuesday’s meeting that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the county.
Still, the federal government took issue with redactions the county made before sending the documents. The county removed Social Security numbers, California identification numbers, voter identification numbers and scans of the voters’ signatures, a move county attorneys argue balances federal disclosure and California laws that limit sharing private information.
County officials said the Department of Justice claimed it needed the registrants’ Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers to verify that the registrar’s office is complying with the Help America Vote Act, a 2002 law that made sweeping reforms to the country’s voting process.
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request from The Times seeking additional details about how the data would be used.
“There is a long history of Republicans focused on vote fraud nationally that doesn’t end up turning out to be large numbers,” said Jon Gould, dean of the school of social ecology at UC Irvine. “And it would seem that this is consistent with that.”
He added it was unclear how the additional information would help the federal government get to the root of a voting integrity problem. “I can’t for the life of me figure out what they’re after other than to keep the controversy going,” he said.
The county’s lawyers offered to produce the redacted information as long as it was under a protective order or confidentiality agreement that would permit the federal government to use the data only for election enforcement purposes. The Department of Justice did not respond to the proposal, according to a county spokesperson.
Supervisor Katrina Foley, a Democrat, said the reason she voted against her colleagues’ request was simple. The registrar of voters doesn’t have the authority under state and federal law to disclose the information, she said.
“We’re following the law. It’s not like this is a gray area where we might have a legal analysis that comes to a different opinion,” she said. “This is black and white law. The way this gets resolved is simply for the court to order the disclosure.”
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