Federal authorities have charged 28 people from across California with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in federal elections despite not being U.S. citizens — escalating an election battle between the state and the Trump administration just weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms.
Authorities said 11 of the 28 were arrested as of Monday and that the 17 others “will be in custody in the near future.” Some of the 28, all of whom are lawful permanent residents of the U.S., are also charged with lying on their naturalization paperwork, officials said.
Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter cast the arrests during a Monday news conference as proof that California voter rolls are corrupted and need to be purged to prevent noncitizens from negating the legitimate votes of U.S. citizens, and that California officials who have rebuffed recent Trump administration efforts to purge the state’s rolls are willfully obstructing justice.
“This Department of Justice will not look the other way while non-citizens vote in federal elections,” McCotter said. “Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for California and L.A. County.”
Federal authorities said 21 of the 28 individuals charged are suspected of actually voting, some in multiple elections.
State and county officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the prosecutions, which federal authorities dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote.”
However, California officials have consistently said that the state has robust laws for preventing ineligible voters from casting ballots, and that there is no evidence that such voting is widespread. They and independent elections experts acknowledge fraud occurs, but say it is rare — and that launching a sweeping effort to purge voter rolls as California voters are already in the process of casting mail ballots violates federal law and threatens to disenfranchise legitimate voters.
The California charges follow dozens of others announced across the country in recent weeks, as the Trump administration has ratcheted up its efforts to identify ineligible voters and trumpet their arrests as proof that President Trump’s long-held claims of election insecurity in the country are valid.
McCotter said in the last seven weeks, the Trump administration has charged 113 people across 20 different states with voting-related crimes. He said the Biden administration had only charged 13 people with such crimes in four years.
The new charges come amid a broader legal battle between the Justice Department and local and state elections officials over alleged voter fraud by noncitizens in California, a conflict that has intensified in recent days.
For months, federal prosecutors have been issuing grand jury subpoenas for voter records in California, including in Los Angeles County.
Then last week, McCotter wrote letters to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots of about 20,000 voters the Justice Department said were “likely noncitizens,” at least until state officials could prove their citizenship.
When Weber and Logan balked at the demand — arguing the Justice Department had provided no proof the voters were ineligible, has presented similar and inaccurate claims in other states and had made the request too close to the upcoming election — the Justice Department sued Thursday, asking a court to immediately intervene and force the state and L.A. County to comply with McCotter’s demands.
On Friday, McCotter warned L.A. County attorneys that county election officials who tabulate ballots from the flagged voters could face criminal prosecution for being “aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”
At the news conference Monday, McCotter said the 28 people charged were among the 20,000 voters the Justice Department had flagged to state officials — and accused state officials of ignoring legitimate federal concerns about illegitimate voters.
Asked why federal authorities were launching such an operation so close to an election, McCotter said California officials had forced that timeline by refusing to cooperate with the Trump administration earlier.
“It’s an emergency of their own creation,” he said.
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., dismissed the idea that such fraud is rare or that Trump officials are overstating the threat, as some Democratic leaders and election experts have argued.
“This is not a conspiracy theory,” Essayli said. “This is not made up stuff.”
Essayli said California’s own process for verifying voters’ citizenship — including requiring that they attest to being a citizen when they register — is insufficient. He said that California election officials have “no idea who is a citizen,” but also know that “they have noncitizens who are getting ballots as we speak.”
U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in Northern California, said the operation “will remain in place through the election and beyond.”
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