President Donald Trump’s administration has sued California, accusing it of missing a deadline to review a list of registered noncitizen voters sent to authorities.
In the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in California, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials asked the court to prevent the state from counting mail-in ballots from voters on a list shared with the state that they say includes 20,000 non-citizens. The agency said it attempted to “cooperate” with California to identify non-citizens who are registered to vote in the state, but “California made no serious effort.”
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The move follows a 48-hour deadline the Justice Department gave California in a letter sent Tuesday to officials in several of the state’s counties, threatening further action if they do not investigate lists of suspected ineligible voters that the Justice Department said it had shared.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the state official responsible for administering elections, responded to the letter, saying in a three-page letter that she wanted to “set the record straight” about what happened since July. A California official claimed the administration was calling for “unprecedented action that threatens the voting rights of thousands of Californians based on unverifiable information and methodology that it has yet to explain or provide.”
Ms Weber said she had been informed that the list provided to local authorities contained approximately 20,000 names. Weber said the list was never sent to her office. The department previously said it suspected “thousands” of registered voters to be noncitizens, and a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department earlier Thursday puts the number at “tens of thousands.”
“Despite not sending my office a list of alleged non-citizens, you are requesting that we send the list and requesting that we review and confirm the citizenship status of approximately 20,000 individuals on the list within just 48 hours and the day before the election,” she wrote. “This is an emergency created by the Department of Justice.”
Election officials in Los Angeles County, one of the county offices that received the ultimatum from the Justice Department, noted in a statement Wednesday that the threat was issued just 21 days before the midterm elections. The county said in a statement that it received a thumb drive containing the letter and a handwritten note with what appeared to be a password, but would not attempt to access the drive because it “does not consider this device to be a secure medium.”
The county office said maintaining accurate voter lists is a “fundamental responsibility of our office,” and state law clearly requires that removal of individuals be “based on verifiable information.”
President Trump has repeatedly denounced false claims that large numbers of non-citizens who are not legally eligible to vote in federal elections are voting in Democratic-led states, including California. Officials in states including California have said the number of such voters is negligible and the problem is not large enough to warrant intervention weeks before the election scheduled for Nov. 3.
California Governor Gavin Newsom slammed the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the state, calling it a “sad and desperate attempt” by President Trump to “suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.”
“The court has made clear that the federal government plays no role in the conduct of state elections,” Newsom said in a statement. “We defend free and fair elections in the Golden State and condemn any authoritarian attempt to undermine our democracy.”
President Trump has falsely claimed for years that non-referendum votes cost him the 2020 election, blaming Democrats for it even though the issue is an extremely rare occurrence.
The courts pushed Trump back.
Earlier this month, a federal judge in Florida ruled that a federal law criminalizing voting by noncitizens was unconstitutional, a major setback to the Trump administration’s efforts to pursue such cases against individuals.
The court ruled that under the U.S. Constitution, only individual states have the power to set eligibility for voters, and that states already criminalize such voting by noncitizens. It was therefore up to the state whether to prosecute such individuals. The Justice Department has at least 45 similar cases pending across the country, and defendants could raise the same challenges raised in the Florida ruling in the future.
Another federal judge ruled this month that the Justice Department illegally requested the state’s voter rolls to be checked against a controversial federal immigration database to identify ineligible voters. The Trump administration has frequently promoted the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, but numerous reports have found it to be inaccurate and potentially report citizens as non-citizens. The justices said it would be unconstitutional to force the state to use such a database.
In September, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting for the Nov. 3 election, but Trump argued that mail-in voting was particularly susceptible to abuse by noncitizens because states did not verify who sent in their mail-in ballots.
Twenty Democratic-led states have filed suit against the Trump administration over attempts to restrict mail-in voting, including an executive order directing federal agencies such as the U.S. Postal Service not to process mail-in ballots without verifying voter eligibility.
About 30% of all ballots cast in the 2024 election were sent by mail, according to the Election Assistance Commission, a nonpartisan government agency. Voting by mail is more widely used in many Western states, including California.
