Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday warned the state’s top judges that the Trump administration may try to seize midterm election ballots as a legal battle continued over unproven federal claims that noncitizens are voting in huge numbers in California.
“I have grave concerns federal agents will seek search warrants to seize ballots and ballot materials before the election results are certified,” the governor wrote in an extraordinary “alert” to the four U.S. District Courts that cover California.
He added: “Indeed, the only reason to do so would be to interfere in a State’s lawful counting of ballots and certifying the results of the election.”
The warning came as the Trump administration is also claiming that there are more than 20,000 California voters who are “likely noncitizens” — an assertion that state election officials have firmly rejected.
On Saturday, data scientists analyzing that list of voters said in a court filing that it contains thousands of errors.
Mr. Newsom’s concerns about the seizure of voting machines or ballots are not unfounded.
In January, federal agents executed a search warrant at an election center in Fulton County, Ga., hauling away boxes of ballots in an effort to discredit Mr. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. The warrant in Fulton County was approved by a federal magistrate judge even though it was based on a series of debunked conspiracy theories about the contentious 2020 presidential race.
Ever since, election officials have worried that the Justice Department might try something similar in different jurisdictions, especially during the highly fraught days after the midterm elections.
Those concerns have not been assuaged, as Mr. Trump himself has warned that the country’s voting machines are vulnerable to foreign meddling. The president has also said that he regretted not seizing voting machines after the 2020 election.
Mr. Newsom is not the only public figure who has expressed concern that the Trump administration might resort to seizing ballots or voting machines.
On Tuesday, two former federal judges issued an unusual public statement to their working colleagues, warning them to use extreme caution before taking the “uniquely serious” step of granting prosecutors a warrant for seizures.
“Unlike the execution of a search warrant for contraband such as drugs or for the records of a criminal enterprise, executing a search warrant for ballots or voting machines before an election is certified would cause irreparable harm to a vital public process: our elections,” the former judges, J. Michael Luttig and Nancy Gertner, wrote.
Mr. Newsom’s letter to the judges was issued on the same day two data scientists from University of California, Los Angeles, released their findings of an analysis of the list of the 20,000 registered voters in California the Trump administration has claimed are not eligible to vote because they are not citizens.
The analysis — contained in court papers filed in district court in Washington by immigration advocates — found that more than 40 percent of the people on the list do not appear on the California state voter rolls. The analysis also found that the list contained thousands of people who appear to be citizens.
The scientists conducted their study by comparing the government’s list of suspected noncitizens with lists of people who had obtained citizenship. They did so with the help of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, a major California nonprofit colloquially known as CHIRLA.
The administration sued California seeking to force state officials to set aside any ballots cast by the 20,000 voters. But a federal appeals court has twice shot down that effort, saying it would rob the state of its authority to administer the election and violate the “plain text” of the Constitution. In between that court’s rulings, a district court in Los Angeles also rejected the administration’s request.
In his letter, Mr. Newsom wrote that, while he was not aware of any such pending application, “the tactics and rhetoric federal officials are using strongly suggest that, having lost repeatedly in federal civil proceedings thus far, they will quickly pivot to the criminal forum.”
The letter included a nonpartisan guide for evaluating search warrant applications that the judges could distribute to lower level federal magistrates.
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