Federal authorities sued Orange County’s top elections official Wednesday, alleging the county registrar violated federal law by refusing to disclose detailed information about people who were removed from the voter rolls because they were not citizens.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court, alleges that Orange County Registrar Bob Page is “concealing the unlawful registration of ineligible, non-citizen voters” by withholding sensitive personal information such as Social Security and driver’s license numbers.
The 10-page lawsuit does not allege that any noncitizens voted in Orange County.
“Voting by noncitizens is a federal crime,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “States and counties that refuse to disclose all requested voter information are in violation of well-established federal elections laws.”
The lawsuit stems from a June 2 letter from the Justice Department to Orange County election officials, seeking information on people who had been removed from the county’s voter rolls because they weren’t eligible to vote. According to the lawsuit, federal officials were acting on a complaint made by the relative of a noncitizen who received a mail ballot.
Over a five-year period, Orange County identified 17 noncitizens who had registered to vote, Page told the federal agency in a June 16 letter, sent in response to the June 2 request. Those people either “self-reported” that they were not citizens or were deemed ineligible by the Orange County district attorney’s office, Page said.
The registrar sent the names, dates of birth and addresses of those 17 people to federal officials, but redacted some sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, voter identification numbers and scans of their signatures, according to a letter from the county’s lawyers.
County lawyers argued that withholding more sensitive personal information struck a balance between federal disclosure laws and state laws that limit how election officials can share private information.
Leon Page, the county counsel for Orange County, who is not related to Bob Page, said in an email that federal officials hadn’t produced a subpoena or identified a “substantive legal authority” for why the registrar’s office should disclose sensitive personal information protected by state law.
County lawyers also offered to draft a “confidentiality agreement that would limit disclosure to a governmental purpose,” he said, but the Justice Department didn’t respond to the offer.
“Instead, the USDOJ filed a lawsuit,” Leon Page said. He said the county hopes to resolve the complaint through a protective order in court. Such an order could put guardrails around how the Justice Department could use or share the information about noncitizens who registered to vote.
Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Marymount University’s law school and a former voting rights lawyer in the Justice Department, said the lawsuit was “a little weird,” in part because government agencies frequently negotiate over sharing information and rarely go to court to do so.
The Justice Department should be able to verify whether Orange County has a process of ensuring that ineligible people are kept off the voter rolls by seeing the full names, addresses and birthdays of those who were removed, he said.
A Social Security number or driver’s license number should not be necessary, he said, raising questions about how the Justice Department plans to use the information it requested.
Federal law requires election officials to maintain voter information for 22 months after an election, Levitt said. Many officials keep those records for longer, but there is no law requiring them to do so. He said he didn’t know “what right the feds have” to request voter information going back to 2020.
“This is a pretty small dispute with pretty small stakes, over a pretty small number of records,” Levitt said. “But it is another dot in what is becoming a series of rather disturbing dots of this administration’s data practices.”
Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner, one of two Republicans on the five-member board, said in a prepared statement that “placing roadblocks and refusing to comply” had “unfortunately and unnecessarily forced the hand of the Department of Justice.”
“We invited this lawsuit,” Wagner said. “The county’s only interest is in having the cleanest possible voter rolls so that every eligible voter may vote, but only eligible voters may vote.”
Supervisor Katrina Foley, a Democrat, defended the county’s decision to redact some information, saying that the county “takes very seriously our duty to protect the private personal information of the people who register to vote in our county.”
“Voter privacy is built into the system and state law prohibits the county from providing private information without a court order,” Foley said. If the Justice Department had secured a court order, Foley said, then the county would provide the requested information.
Californians are required to verify their identities when they register to vote, and that information is cross-referenced with Department of Motor Vehicle files. The state also imposes penalties for fraudulent registration.
In a Reddit Q&A with the Orange County Register last year, Bob Page said that state law bars the registrar’s office from verifying someone’s citizenship when they register to vote, beyond the verification done by the state.
He said his office makes daily updates to voter registration files and averaged about 60,000 changes each month. His office would contact the Orange County district attorney or California secretary of state if it is provided evidence of someone illegally registering to vote, the registrar said.
An Orange County spokesperson said that of the 17 people who were registered to vote and were not eligible over a five-year period, 16 self-reported that they were not citizens.
The district attorney’s office found that one person had registered to vote despite not being a citizen. That person, a Canadian citizen and legal resident, pleaded guilty in 2024 to three misdemeanor counts of casting votes in the primary and general 2016 elections. He was sentenced to one year of informal probation.
Bob Page did not return messages seeking comment about the suit. A spokesperson for the registrar’s office said the county does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.
Last year, voters in Santa Ana rejected a measure that would have allowed noncitizens to vote in local races. The measure would have allowed residents of the city, even if they are not citizens, to cast ballots in local measures, but they would still be ineligible to vote in federal and state elections.
San Francisco has allowed the parents of schoolchildren to vote in school board races, even if they are not citizens. Voters in Oakland approved a similar measure in 2022 but has not implemented it yet.
Some cities in Maryland and Vermont have also moved to allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, but the measures have met with legal challenges.
A New York City law that would have allowed noncitizens to vote was struck down in March by the state’s top court, finding it violated the state’s constitution.
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