Politics
California rejects federal demand to remove 20,000 alleged noncitizens from voter rolls
The Justice Department sued California after state and local officials declined to act on a federal list of roughly 20,000 voters suspected of being noncitizens. Voting rights groups say the move may violate a court order restricting the administration’s access to sensitive voter data, while the department says it used other methods.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued California after state and local election officials refused to remove roughly 20,000 registered voters whom the Trump administration alleges are noncitizens, escalating a dispute over voter data less than three weeks before Election Day as voting is already underway in the state.
The department sent California officials letters on Oct. 13 giving them 48 hours to review the list and remove voters it considered ineligible. After the deadline passed, the Justice Department filed suit. Officials have not publicly established that the people on the list are noncitizens or ineligible to vote.
The lawsuit follows an Oct. 9 ruling by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan that rejected the department’s effort to obtain states’ unredacted voter rolls and share them with the Department of Homeland Security. Those records contain sensitive personal information. The Justice Department said Friday it plans to appeal that ruling.
Voting-rights organizations Common Cause and the Campaign Legal Center have asked Sooknanan to hold a hearing on whether the administration’s actions in California violate her order. In a court filing, their lawyers argued that the Justice Department’s demand could interfere with voter-roll maintenance and threaten voters’ ability to cast ballots without adequately accounting for the reliability of the government’s data.
Sooknanan ordered the department Friday to respond to the groups’ request by Monday in federal court in Washington, D.C.
The Justice Department says Homeland Security obtained a publicly available California voter roll, rather than the unredacted records at issue in the earlier case, and did not use the department’s SAVE citizenship-verification system to generate the list. A Justice Department trial attorney wrote that the judge’s order did not bar other investigative methods or enforcement actions, and noted that Homeland Security was not a party to the voter-data lawsuit.
The California complaint says Immigration and Customs Enforcement compared voter-roll information with its internal data, then used additional steps to assign confidence levels to potential matches. The department says people still believed to be noncitizens were referred for further review. Homeland Security said Friday that it draws on government and commercial data sources to supplement public information.
The roughly 20,000 people named in the suit represent about 0.08% of California’s 23.2 million registered voters. The administration previously said it had identified more than 190,000 potential noncitizens on the state’s rolls. Homeland Security said Friday that 190,000 remains its broader estimate, while the smaller number refers to people who have undergone manual verification so far.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the alleged registrations “completely unacceptable” and said the department was committed to identifying unlawful voting. California Attorney General Rob Bonta disputed the administration’s claims, saying there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud and that the state would challenge the department’s demands in court.
The lawsuit comes amid broader efforts by the Trump administration to obtain state voter information. The Justice Department has lost 23 similar lawsuits seeking state voter data, according to the report. Voting-rights advocates say the timing and disputed methods raise concerns about federal pressure on election officials and the risk of eligible voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.