The administration of United States President Donald Trump has sued the state of California after the state missed a deadline to review a list of registered noncitizen voters sent to officials. In the lawsuit, filed on Thursday in a US District Court in California, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials asked the court to prevent the state from counting mail-in ballots from voters on a list shared with the state that it said contained 20,000 noncitizens. The agency said it had attempted to “work collaboratively” with California to identify noncitizens registered to vote in the state, but “California made no serious effort to do so”.
The move follows a 48-hour deadline the DOJ gave California in letters sent to officials in several counties in the state on Tuesday, threatening further action if they did not review lists of allegedly ineligible voters the agency said it had shared. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the top state official tasked with administering elections, responded to the letters, saying in a three-page letter that she wanted to “set the record straight” on events that transpired since July. The senior California official maintains that the administration is demanding “unprecedented measures that threaten thousands of Californians’ right to vote, based on unverifiable information or methodology that you still fail to explain or provide”.
Weber said she was informed that the lists provided to local officials include the names of roughly 20,000 individuals. Weber said no list was ever sent to her office. The department previously said it suspected “thousands” of registered voters of being noncitizens, and a lawsuit filed earlier Thursday by the Justice Department put the number at “tens of thousands”.
The county statement said it had received a thumb drive with the letter and a handwritten note with what appeared to be a password, but it would not attempt to access the drive because “we do not consider the device a secure medium”. The county office said maintaining accurate voter lists was “a fundamental responsibility for our office” and that state laws clearly require that removing individuals be “based on verifiable information”. Trump has repeatedly levelled the false claim that large numbers of noncitizens, who are legally not eligible to vote in federal elections, are casting ballots in Democratic-led states, including in California.
State officials, including in California, have said the number of such voters is negligible and that the scale of the problem does not warrant intervention just weeks before elections, scheduled for November 3. California Governor Gavin Newsom has sharply rebuked the DOJ lawsuit against his state, calling it a “sad, desperate attempt by” Trump to “suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day”. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Florida ruled that a federal law criminalising voting by noncitizens was unconstitutional, delivering a major setback for Trump administration efforts to pursue such cases against individuals.
The court ruled that, under the US Constitution, only individual states have the authority to set voter qualifications, and that each one had already criminalised such voting by anyone who was not a citizen. Thus, it was up to the state to prosecute such individuals. The DOJ has at least 45 such cases pending nationwide, where the accused could now raise the same objection brought up in the Florida ruling.
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