Justice Department gives California counties 48 hours to set aside ballots of suspected noncitizens

By Kenji Harrow

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has asked election offices in 57 of California’s 58 counties to help identify registered voters it believes are noncitizens and to set aside, rather than cancel, those voters’ mail ballots until their citizenship can be confirmed. The letters, dated Friday, gave the counties 48 hours to respond, a deadline that runs out this weekend, nine days before Election Day, the Los Angeles Times reported. Los Angeles County did not get one because it had already been notified.

The department says federal law bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections and that California does not check citizenship itself. “California does not verify citizenship status. We did the work for them,” Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, wrote on X on Friday. “The letters speak for themselves. Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” he said in a statement.

For voters whose “citizenship status cannot be confirmed, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots,” Essayli wrote, according to six letters the department shared with Reuters. He warned that officials who knowingly count such ballots risk becoming “aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

The Inquisitor asked the White House and the Justice Department on Sunday for comment on the letters and on how the list was compiled. Neither had responded by publication. The department did not respond to the Los Angeles Times.

The numbers. Each letter draws on the roughly 20,000-name statewide list the department first sent to state and Los Angeles County officials on Oct. 13. The letters shared with Reuters list 1,754 suspected noncitizens registered in Orange County, 1,355 in Riverside, 1,133 in San Bernardino, 334 in Ventura, 180 in Santa Barbara and 63 in San Luis Obispo. A letter from Craig Missakian, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, to Contra Costa County listed “407 likely aliens,” the Times reported. Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber said her letter named 81 people.

Missakian asked for “nonpublic information” on each voter, including Social Security numbers, copies of state IDs or driver’s licenses, registration applications and the documents shown at registration, according to the Times.

The Oct. 13 request. The department’s first letter, to Secretary of State Shirley Weber, published by Democracy Docket, cited the federal ban on noncitizen voting, 18 U.S.C. § 611, and said California’s system automatically mails ballots to “every registered voter.” It asked the state to review the list within 48 hours and called the process one that “will protect American citizens’ votes while preventing noncitizens from participating in the federal election.” When state and county officials did not comply, the department sued; a hearing is set for Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles, and the department has asked the 9th Circuit to step in.

California’s response. County officials said they were reviewing the letters with their lawyers. “This threat is not helpful and is intended to intimidate,” said Kristin Connelly, the Contra Costa County registrar, according to the Times. Dawn Kruger, a spokesperson for that county’s elections office, told Reuters the letter came “with an unenforceable 48-hour deadline” and said the county would keep following federal and state law. “This is not normal protocol for us,” said Webber, who is president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials.

Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar, has said an early review of part of the original list found many people who were born in the United States, were not registered or had never voted. Weber has accused the administration of trying to get protected voter data unlawfully and purge the rolls. State Attorney General Rob Bonta told MS Now the department was “politicizing and weaponizing the law,” Reuters reported. Sen. Alex Padilla, the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, said the administration does not “have the authority to interfere.”

The record. A federal judge earlier rejected the department’s suit for California’s voter records, and the department has lost similar voter-roll cases in other states, the Times reported. The administration has also stepped up prosecutions of noncitizens accused of voting illegally, Reuters reported.

The Inquisitor also asked Weber’s office, Bonta’s office, the Contra Costa and Orange County registrars and the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials for comment on Sunday. None had responded by publication.

Photo: An official election ballot drop box in Mendocino County, Calif., in April 2023. Sarah Stierch / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.