The Department of Justice has revealed new details about how federal investigators flagged more than 20,000 California voters they allege are likely noncitizens, as the Trump administration asks a federal court to prevent their mail ballots from being tabulated until citizenships can be verified. A lawsuit filed Thursday describes a multistage process involving U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), including database matching, third-party software and checks against federal records.
The details shed new light on how the Trump administration arrived at a figure California officials strongly dispute. The federal government provided California officials with a list of more than 20,000 names on Tuesday and gave them 48 hours to review it. After California declined to carry out the requested measures by the DOJ's deadline, the department sued California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan.
According to the government's complaint, USCIS compares voter-roll information with its internal data to identify possible matches between registered voters and people who may be noncitizens. The process sorts potential matches into high-, medium- or low-confidence categories. A "high-confidence" match means multiple identifiers support what USCIS considers a strong link between the voter information and its records, the lawsuit says.
The filing acknowledges a potential obstacle in that process: Voter-roll information typically does not contain complete information about a person. USCIS, therefore, uses third-party software to help identify possible matches. Medium- and low-confidence matches can reflect incomplete, outdated or mismatched information, according to the complaint.
The complaint also says the analysis was conducted independently of the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program because, to the government's knowledge, California had not submitted voter rolls through that system. For high-confidence matches, investigators attempt to connect the voter information with an alien number in USCIS systems. They then search for evidence that the person has become a naturalized citizen or may have derived citizenship through their parents or other means.
USCIS also checks State Department records for indicators of citizenship and Social Security Administration records to determine whether an individual has died. A second-level review is conducted before USCIS forwards to HSI the names of voters it assesses with "high confidence" to be likely noncitizens. HSI then further investigates the names "to determine whether the voters are noncitizens." As part of that process, the agency uses its own analytical platform to address potential information mismatches before sending the data to investigators for further steps, according to the complaint.
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