The justice department’s list of suspected non-citizens in California includes a “high percentage” of people born in the United States, Los Angeles election officials said on Tuesday. The statement, made in court papers, raises further questions about the reliability of a list of 20,000 people the justice department provided to election officials in Los Angeles last week. The department sent the county and California secretary of state the list last week and gave them a 48-hour deadline to segregate ballots cast from anyone on the list unless they could verify their citizenship.
California election officials refused and the Department of Justice sued them on Thursday. Of the 20,000 names delivered to Los Angeles county, only about 7,000 people had an address in the county, according to the filing. Los Angeles officials analyzed a sample of 200 people on the list.
It is not immediately clear how many people that is and a county spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment. Forty-three per cent of those on the list had a voter registration record that had been cancelled, Bhullar said in his declaration. Seventy-one per cent of those in the sample never voted, and 86 people had been mailed a ballot this year.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has compiled the list of non-citizens on the rolls, has resisted state demands to share its methodology for matching voter rolls for non-citizen records. Experts have warned that the way DHS is trying to match voter rolls to its own records could be error-prone. Indeed, the DHS does not have a good track record so far.
In July, it accused Nevada of having as many as 16,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls. DHS officials later sent Nevada election officials a list of 185 people it believed were non-citizens. Nevada officials responded by investigating the list and said all 185 were in fact citizens.
R Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general, acknowledged during a press conference on Monday there could be citizens on the list. We’re not perfect, and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us,” he said at a Monday press conference. Kiersten Pels, a justice department spokesperson, said that just because someone listed a US birthplace on their voter registration form it didn’t mean they were a citizen.
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