The Trump administration sued California on Thursday over its handling of voter fraud allegations, asking a federal court to immediately bar the state from counting the ballots of about 20,000 voters statewide — many of them in Los Angeles County — who the administration said are “likely noncitizens.”
The lawsuit is highly unusual, especially since California voters have already started voting in the Nov. 3 midterm elections by mail, experts said.
It’s also “baseless,” highly inappropriate and based on questionable federal data that has been shown to be wildly inaccurate in other states, state officials said.
“This is a sad and desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day,” Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on
“Every count, recount, hand recount, lawsuit and audit has revealed that there is no widespread voter fraud in the United States,” said California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta wrote on »
American Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, in his own statement, defended the trial.
“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” he said. “If found liable in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated the laws that protect our nation’s system of representative government.”
The lawsuit says that “as part of an investigation into illegal voting,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services conducted a “multi-agency, multi-level review” of state voter and federal citizenship data and determined with “high confidence” that approximately 20,000 “likely non-citizens” are registered to vote in the state.
He then forwarded those names to Homeland Security Investigations, which conducted its own investigation and concluded the same thing, the lawsuit says.
“This means that, pursuant to state law, nearly 20,000 non-citizens of California have received an absentee ballot to participate in the federal election (or will receive one), with many addresses listed in Los Angeles County,” the lawsuit claims.
The trial comes two days after the acting assistant district attorney. Gen. Trent McCotter wrote to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the Los Angeles County Registrar/Clerk’s Office, giving them 48 hours to void the same ballots to investigate the citizenship status of those voters.
McCotter had said the Trump administration would be forced to seek emergency relief from the courts if Weber and Logan did not comply.
The lawsuit — which also names Weber and Logan as defendants — comes about three months after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote his own letter to Weber, alleging there could be more than 190,000 noncitizens registered to vote in California.
The lawsuit makes no mention of this earlier estimate, or why Homeland Security’s initial estimate was so much higher than its current estimate. It clarifies that USCIS’ identification with a “high level of confidence” that a voter is likely a non-citizen “means that the match between voter information on the voter roll and USCIS internal records is strong and consistent, based on multiple identifiers that support a strong identity link.” »
He also said: “The federal government informed California months ago that many non-citizens could be registered to vote in California. Despite knowing that California must send mail-in ballots to every registered voter, the state has made no serious attempt to work with the federal government to determine whether non-citizens are registered to vote.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for more information on how the 190,000 figure fell to 20,000.
In a letter to McCotter, Weber noted both numbers and accused the Trump administration of trying to disenfranchise voters at the last minute before the midterms, based on shoddy data work and lack of certainty that those voters would not be eligible.
“Nowhere has the federal government clarified why it is suspected – or even confirmed with any level of certainty – that those on the list are non-citizens. And as one court recently noted, the federal government’s citizenship records are ‘known to be unreliable,'” Weber wrote, referring to a case brought against the Justice Department by the organization Common Cause. “To give just one example, in a similar incident in the State of Nevada, DHS initially claimed that Nevada’s voter rolls included nearly 16,000 potential non-citizens. However, after working with the State of Nevada, DHS officials were unable to establish that a single non-citizen was on the voter rolls.”
Weber called it “remarkable” that the Justice Department required his office to “review and confirm the citizenship status of each of the approximately 20,000 people on the list on the eve of an election and within as little as 48 hours,” although he provided no clear evidence that those people were improperly registered.
“This is an emergency related to the creation of the DOJ,” Weber wrote. “California’s election administration will continue to be governed by applicable federal and state laws, not unsubstantiated claims and outrageous demands.”
Logan said Thursday that his office responded to McCotter’s letter by “outlining the legal and operational concerns” he had with his requests — including that the voter list included people from all over California, not just Los Angeles County — only to later learn that the Justice Department had filed its complaint without any acknowledgment of the county’s “timely response.”
Logan said the Justice Department “has not provided the underlying evidence, source or methodology to support its assertions that individuals identified in its records are ineligible to vote,” and his office “cannot withhold or refuse to count ballots based solely on unverified allegations” — particularly regarding individuals outside the county.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, published an article about the trial on
“It’s not political or controversial,” he wrote. “We will not allow California to dilute the votes of American citizens.”
The lawsuit filed by the Trump administration says that while the United States is “actively investigating and prosecuting incidents of illegal voting,” it “is not possible or feasible for the United States to investigate before the 2026 election finds only thousands, much less tens of thousands, of individuals that two federal investigative bureaus have identified on California’s voter rolls as likely to have received mail-in ballots.” »
For this reason, he claims, “California is thus knowingly imposing an obstacle to the United States’ ability to enforce (federal election law) by facilitating illegal voting rather than working with the federal government to prevent it,” and the state is therefore legally prohibited from sending mail-in ballots to the 20,000 voters flagged by Homeland Security.
It asks the federal court in the Central District of California to declare that the state’s actions — including providing and counting the ballots of those 20,000 people — are prohibited by law and in violation of the Supremacy Clause, and to issue an injunction barring the state from counting those ballots in the federal election “until the citizenship status of those individuals can be verified.”
The Trump administration’s attempts to use immigration data to draw conclusions about California voter rolls and interfere in California elections are already being challenged in a separate federal case in the District of Washington, D.C., brought by attorneys with the UCLA Voting Rights Project on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo.
UCLA lawyers filed their own emergency motion Thursday to block the Justice Department from taking such action against California, citing letters McCotter sent to Weber and Logan.
In that case, a judge ordered the parties to meet and file a status report with the court by Friday, indicating when each party would be able to brief the court on the matter.
Several Democratic senators charged with overseeing elections — including Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) — wrote Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel on Thursday to denounce a series of election-related actions taken recently by the Justice Department, including letters sent to Weber and Logan, as “setting the stage” for the Trump administration “to potentially challenge ballots before Election Day.”
The senators wrote that the department’s 48-hour requests to California election officials came “at a time when state and local election officials should be focusing their time and resources on running safe and secure elections – and despite the administration’s demonstrated track record of misidentifying eligible voters as non-citizens.”
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) also denounced the pressure campaign on California election officials, calling it “another dangerous attempt to destabilize our safe and secure elections” in an article on “Don’t poke the bear.”
Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.
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