California election officials looking into Trump administration demands to verify the citizenship or block the votes of suspected noncitizens said on Friday that the government had sent them lists so sloppily compiled, and on such short notice, that it was difficult, if not impossible, to comply.
Officials said that they received thousands of names lacking critical identifying information like Social Security numbers, and that many of the names were paired with California addresses over which they had no jurisdiction.
“It was basically a data dump,” said Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for Los Angeles County’s registrar’s office.
The method by which the federal government transmitted the list — a thumb drive with a sticky note containing a password — also initially threatened the security of voter rolls, and made elections officials reluctant to use it, Mr. Sanchez said.
The government later sent a spreadsheet that was an unsubstantiated jumble, he said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, defended the government’s demands, saying that the names had been “confirmed from a review of federal databases.”
“The data has been provided to California, and they are free to check the work,” he posted on X on Friday. “But that suggests California is actually interested in complying with federal election laws.”
The complaints from California officials follow a lawsuit filed Thursday by the Trump administration seeking to temporarily pre-empt California, a heavily Democratic state, from counting mail ballots submitted by people it says may not be U.S. citizens, and are thus ineligible to vote in the midterm elections on Nov. 3. The suit names the top voting official in Los Angeles County as well.
The administration has conducted a series of escalating — and largely unsuccessful — legal fights with election officials across the country, aiming to demonstrate a pattern of large-scale illegal voting in U.S. elections. The federal government, by law, plays a limited role in U.S. elections, which state and local authorities supervise and handle.
But the Trump administration has pushed to assume far greater authority over the management of state voter rolls, basing its arguments on allegations of mass voting by noncitizens, despite evidence that it is very rare.
Reviews by election officials and criminal investigators have found small numbers of people voting illegally in each election cycle, but not at anything approaching an election-determining scale. And previous claims by the administration about large numbers of noncitizens voting in states like Nevada have collapsed when scrutinized.
The suit filed this week involves a court order being sought by the Justice Department to prevent the counting of votes by about 20,000 people identified by the Department of Homeland Security “until their citizenship status can be determined.” The roster is a minute fraction of the more than 23 million registered voters in the state, where voting is already underway.
The lawsuit was filed two days after prosecutors wrote to the California secretary of state, Shirley Weber, and Los Angeles County’s top election official, Dean Logan, demanding that they verify the citizenship of the people on the list within 48 hours or prevent their votes from being counted. California officials called that an impossible timeline.
Ms. Weber responded that the demands and deadline “threaten thousands of Californians’ right to vote,” that they were “based on unverifiable information” and that the federal government had offered no basis for suspecting that the people on the list were noncitizens and no methodology for its assumptions.
She added that the list, which is drawn from across the state, was not even sent to her office, but only to Los Angeles County, which has no jurisdiction over voters in the state’s 57 other counties.
In court filings, the Justice Department laid out how the Trump administration compiled the California list by comparing a public, commercially available version of the state’s voter roll to federal immigration records. They also state that the government used unnamed “third-party software” to help.
The filings describe a process that has led to mistakes in other states, in part because public voter rolls do not include Social Security numbers or similar unique identifiers.
Also, federal immigration records can be outdated and do not necessarily capture when immigrants become citizens. And a Homeland Security Department whistle-blower said criminal investigators had sometimes reviewed the cases of alleged noncitizen voters in as little as 12 minutes as part of a wider push.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson on Friday defended its methods, saying federal officials had used multiple data sources in addition to the public voter data they pulled to further verify the identity of registrants and eliminate false positives. The additional data included government data and “commercial third-party data,” according to the spokesperson. The spokesperson also denied that the agency had used third-party software, contradicting what the Justice Department said.
Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, said the state would not comply with the demands, but rather would respond in court. Gov. Gavin Newsom called the lawsuit “a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.”
In Los Angeles County, voting officials said they had started to examine an Excel spreadsheet federal prosecutors transmitted later with what appeared to be the same list of more than 20,000 names that was said to be on thumb drive.
Mr. Sanchez said the list was from all over the state, not just Los Angeles County, “and there was no sortation by county, city, ZIP code or source verification.”
That spreadsheet, he said, is being examined by county officials to determine how many people on it, if any, are registered voters in Los Angeles. The Justice Department, he added, “made no attempt to engage, other than dropping off the letter” less than 48 hours before the response deadline, and then filing the lawsuit a day after sending the spreadsheet.
“The message we’re trying to put out is, we don’t want this to be a distraction or deter people from voting,” said Mr. Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder.
The government’s demands, he added, seem to be “largely performative, and a lot of legal questions remain up in the air that we believe will be best addressed through the litigation. Our focus is in conducting a fair, accurate and transparent election over the next 18 days.”
Devlin Barrett and Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting.
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