The 28 California voting cases, and the 20,000-name list behind them

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s newest election-crime cases cover 28 people in a state with 23 million registered voters. The administration says they are proof of a much bigger problem: a list of more than 20,000 California registrants it believes are “likely” noncitizens, which California says it has never been given the means to check.

Federal agents arrested 11 of the 28 on Monday, the department announced, under what it called “Operation Protect the Vote,” a joint effort of all four U.S. attorney’s offices in California. All 28 are lawful permanent residents, or green-card holders, who are not allowed to vote in federal elections. Prosecutors allege in criminal complaints that they falsely claimed citizenship to register, and most are also accused of lying on naturalization applications by saying they had never claimed citizenship or voted. A department spokesperson said 21 of the 28 had cast ballots, The Guardian reported. The charges are accusations; the defendants are presumed innocent.

“Each of the 28 defendants charged today appears on the list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants we provided to California election officials last week,” Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said in the release. “California must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted.”

What the charging papers show

The Inquisitor tallied the defendants as the department listed them. Thirteen were charged in the Central District of California (Los Angeles and surrounding counties), six in the Eastern District (Fresno, Sacramento and the Central Valley), five in the Northern District (the Bay Area) and four in the Southern District (San Diego). The charges range from felony false statements in naturalization proceedings, each carrying up to five years, to misdemeanor voting by a noncitizen, which carries up to a year, according to the release.

The alleged registrations stretch back more than two decades, the earliest to 2002. Several defendants were already applying to become citizens, and the naturalization paperwork is what produced most of the felony counts. Court papers made public Monday suggest some were confused about their eligibility, The Guardian reported: one man who has been a permanent resident since 1976 told investigators he registered with the help of canvassers outside a supermarket and was told by poll workers it was “OK” to vote; another, a resident since 1993, said he did not recall registering but filled out the ballot California mailed him in 2024 and “did not intend to defraud anyone,” according to an investigator’s affidavit.

The 20,000 names

The cases arrive days after the department sued California over its voter list. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in that announcement that DHS compared “publicly available California voter-registration files” with federal immigration data and that the “preliminary analysis” remained ongoing.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, in a letter to McCotter last week, said DHS first told her in July that more than 190,000 registered voters “may be” noncitizens, then refused to put its data or methodology in writing. The list delivered to Los Angeles County contains about 20,000 names statewide, she wrote, and “lacks both the detail and function to be of any investigative use.” She said the department’s demand that the state set aside and not count those voters’ mail ballots would violate the National Voter Registration Act’s ban on systematic removals in the 90 days before a federal election, and she cited an Oct. 9 federal court ruling in Common Cause v. Department of Justice describing federal citizenship records as “known to be unreliable.”

McCotter conceded Monday that the list may include citizens. “We’re not perfect, and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us,” he said, describing 190,000 as “the ceiling” and 20,000 as “the floor” of names flagged with varying confidence, The Guardian reported.

The view from other states

Nevada is the cautionary case both sides cite. DHS wrongly identified 185 people on Nevada’s rolls as noncitizens, state officials said last month, The Guardian reported (earlier coverage); Weber’s letter, citing The New York Times, said an initial federal claim of nearly 16,000 potential noncitizens there ultimately did not establish a single one.

The California cases are part of a national push. The department said Monday that federal prosecutors had charged 112 people in 20 states in recent weeks with registration and voting offenses, according to The Guardian. An earlier release announced charges against 16 people in North Carolina, New York and Idaho, some of whom are accused of voting in elections going back to 2008.

Measured against the electorate, the numbers remain small: California has about 23.1 million registered voters, according to the secretary of state’s latest report of registration. Whether the 20,000-name list holds up, and whether a court orders any ballots set aside before Nov. 3, is now the question for the lawsuit.

Photo: The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington. APK, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.