DOJ Tells At Least 18 California Counties to Set Aside Ballots Over Alleged Noncitizens
Election officials were given 48 hours to hand over voter information. The state says the letters contained errors, and local registrars say they are counting votes as usual.
Federal prosecutors sent letters to county registrars across California on Friday demanding that local officials set aside and verify ballots the Justice Department says may belong to noncitizens, according to the Los Angeles County registrar and a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
At least 18 counties received similar letters, the L.A. County registrar's office said. They were given 48 hours to provide identifying information for the ballots, including Social Security numbers, ID information and copies of registrations, and were asked to sequester any ballots where citizenship cannot be verified. The letter sent to San Bernardino County said the government's list of suspected noncitizen voters includes 1,133 people there. "Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy," said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli.
The letters are the latest escalation in a legal fight between California and the Justice Department. Earlier this month, the government sued Los Angeles County and the California Secretary of State's office to block them from counting the votes of more than 20,000 people it alleges are "likely" noncitizen voters. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, and on Friday the administration asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to rule on the case, setting a deadline of Saturday and barring a decision from the district judge.
Illegal voting by noncitizens is incredibly rare, difficult to prove and has not been shown to change the outcome of races, the AP noted. The California attorney general's office said the letters contained errors. Mendocino County officials, for example, received a list of people who were not residents there, according to a state court filing.
Justice Department spokeswoman Kiersten Pels said the department is explicitly "not requesting a purge, cancellation of registrations, or any programmatic action." She said federal officials want collaboration to "ensure the most secure election in California history." California officials say the demands could delay certification of the vote and undermine the legitimacy of the November midterms, and that disenfranchisement of citizens is a risk.
Voting is under way. The state's more than 23 million registered voters received mail ballots earlier this month, and the state said in filings that over 330,000 had already been counted. Napa County registrar John Tuteur said two uniformed Department of Homeland Security officers delivered a letter to his office late Friday listing 42 people the government accused of being noncitizens illegally registered to vote. About 86,000 people are registered in the county, and roughly 11,000 had already returned a mail ballot. "All of this is simply meant to raise huge doubts about the integrity of this election," Tuteur said. "We're not changing anything we're doing. We're proceeding with the election."
The letters followed a statewide sweep earlier in the week in which 28 people from the list of 20,000 were charged with illegally registering to vote. Some were also charged with illegally voting and lying on naturalization paperwork. Separately, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has filed 31 lawsuits to force states to hand over unredacted voter rolls and has so far lost 26 of them without a legal victory. Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, said the department has "not provided any evidence for their claims of massive voter fraud."
