The Department of Justice sent letters on Friday to local election officials across California demanding that they help identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots.
The letter — sent to every county in the state, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles — also said local officials would “risk significant federal scrutiny” if they failed to comply to the Justice Department’s demands.
Dispatched a week and a half before the midterm elections, the threat arrived as the Trump administration has begun a blitz of initiatives aimed at unearthing evidence of noncitizen voting or stalling election processes in states where it has dubiously claimed that large numbers of noncitizens were registered to vote or were regularly voting.
Last week, the Trump administration sued California, a heavily Democratic state, seeking to temporarily pre-empt the counting of more than 20,000 mail ballots sent to people it said were suspected of registering to vote for the Nov. 3 election, even though they were not U.S. citizens. A federal judge has scheduled a hearing next week on the lawsuit, but the Justice Department on Friday filed papers urging an appeals court to decide the issue this weekend.
California elections rely heavily on mail voting, which President Trump claims is rife with fraud, even though evidence shows only a handful of one-off cases. The Justice Department claims that California’s practice of sending a ballot to every registered voter could result in voting by noncitizens who are on the voter rolls even though only American citizens can vote in federal elections.
On Friday, Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said the agency’s request to the local officials is a way to “ensure the most secure election in California history.”
In a news conference in Los Angeles on Monday, federal prosecutors framed the Trump administration’s extraordinary move as a responsible effort to safeguard the election.
“We don’t care who you vote for,” said Craig Missakian, the U.S. attorney for California’s Northern District. “What we care about is making sure that every legitimate vote is counted, that we ensure a level playing field for all Americans.”
California officials, however, have denounced the effort as politically motivated and legally questionable. Critics and judges have said that the Trump administration has generated its lists of names from error-filled data, endangering the rights of eligible voters.
On Monday, federal prosecutors announced that they had charged 28 of the state’s more than 23 million registered voters with allegedly casting ballots illegally in elections. In a separate federal case, a judge in Oakland on Wednesday blocked the Homeland Security Department from carrying out most field operations focused on uncovering voter fraud in nine states, citing issues with the government’s methodology for determining who was eligible to vote.
The letter served on Friday in California says it included a list of people who the Justice Department believes are illegally registered to vote. It describes them as a subset of the 20,000 people throughout California whom the agency identified last week as possible noncitizens who may have received ballots.
The local officials have 48 hours to work with the federal government “to identify who on the accompanying list is a citizen and who is not,” the letter said.
For those whose “citizenship status cannot be confirmed, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate — not cancel — those individuals vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” the letter said.
Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco, received a letter with an accompanying list of 407 names. But the county will continue to process ballots as normal and has no plans to set any aside, said Dawn Kruger, a spokeswoman for the county’s elections department.
“It’s 11 days from Election Day, and this is just not in line with regular precedents,” she said.
The head of elections in Santa Cruz County said that she received a list with 81 names and that she was still reviewing the information. A letter to San Bernardino County said its list included 1,133 names.
In rural Inyo County, along the Nevada border, the registrar of voters said the list she was sent included just two people, and neither of them had been issued ballots. Danielle Sexton, the registrar, said her records showed they had never voted anywhere in California.
And in Mendocino County, a rugged stretch on the north coast, the registrar said the list she received was completely wrong.
“It’s not our voters that were listed,” said Katrina Bartolomie, the Mendocino clerk-recorder. “It’s from another county.”
In an email sent on Friday to members of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, the Los Angeles County registrar, Dean Logan, called the Justice Department dispatch a “posture of intimidation.”
The letter, he wrote, “misrepresents the facts of their own actions, attempts to tarnish the secretary of state and Los Angeles County, and threatens local election officials” days before the election.
But Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Southern California, said the federal government will enforce the law to ensure that only American citizens vote.
“The letters speak for themselves,” he said in a statement. “Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy.”
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
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