The Department of Justice on Thursday sued the top election officials in California and Los Angeles County, claiming they were planning to count ballots from more than 20,000 alleged noncitizens in next month’s midterm elections.
The unusual lawsuit came two days after Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter sent Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters Dean Logan a computer thumb drive with the names of suspected noncitizens and told him to agree within 48 hours to prevent the counting of their ballots unless he had proof they were citizens who are eligible to vote. Logan responded by saying he hadn’t opened the file because doing so would conflict with privacy and data security protocols.
Canceling a voter registration requires verifiable information and “not assertions of unconfirmed data matching,” he added.
On Thursday, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to issue an injunction preventing election officials from counting the ballots of the voters it has identified until their citizenship status can be verified. The lawsuit, brought in the name of the United States, was filed against Logan, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D) and the state of California.
“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.
Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections, and they rarely attempt to do so, according to past court cases and independent reviews.
President Donald Trump has nonetheless portrayed noncitizen voting as rampant and his administration for months has warned states to prevent it from happening.
State and local election officials have treated the administration’s claims with skepticism, noting that it has often falsely identified citizens as noncitizens. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security initially claimed up to 16,000 noncitizens were on the voter rolls in Nevada. It later lowered its estimate to 185. State election officials determined all of those voters were citizens.
Administration officials have contended that as many as 190,000 noncitizens are on the voter rolls in California, but the Justice Department used a smaller number in the lawsuit, saying it was highly confident more than 20,000 California voters are noncitizens. Weber said DHS had not explained its methodology to her.
“The USDOJ’s relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” she said in a statement before the lawsuit was filed.
She said the state removes ineligible voters from its rolls and is committed to ensuring this fall’s election runs smoothly.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said the administration’s actions violate state and federal law, as well as a court decision last week that blocks the Justice Department from running names through flawed federal databases to try to find noncitizen voters. Federal law bars states from purging large numbers of voters from their rolls in the 90 days before an election, and Bonta said the administration was trying to get California officials to do that.
“This is nothing more than their ongoing, dangerous, reckless, scorched-earth, widespread attempt to advance conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud that doesn’t exist,” Bonta said in a news conference.
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