The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) in California has indicted six more people for alleged voter fraud crimes, an escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign against the state’s election processes on the eve of the midterm elections.
Bill Essayli, Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor and a close ally of the president, announced Monday that his office was prosecuting six legal permanent residents accused of illegally registering to vote and voting fraudulently. The Justice Department filed similar charges against 28 people across California last month and staged a dramatic on-camera arrest of a 72-year-old defendant, editing the footage into a Justice Department promotional video.
The six new defendants are all green card holders, according to criminal complaints filed in federal court, meaning they are immigrants who have legal status but are not eligible to vote.
Non-citizen voting is extremely rare, and experts say that when non-citizens end up on voter rolls, it is usually due to confusion.
The latest arrests come as the Justice Department continues its lawsuit aimed at forcing California election officials to throw out about 20,000 ballots that federal prosecutors say may belong to noncitizens who registered fraudulently. The DoJ said the ballots should not be counted until California confirms their citizenship status. State election leaders countered that the prosecutors’ list and methodology were unreliable and that complying with the requirements in the middle of an election would be logistically impossible and risk disenfranchising American citizens. Several judges have rejected the DoJ’s efforts as unconstitutional and a threat to democracy, and the US Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s appeals.
Five of the six people charged in the latest round of prosecutions have been arrested, Essayli said at a news conference Monday. The six defendants are from Mexico, Israel, the Philippines, Canada and Iran, prosecutors said.
All six are charged with a single charge, each of them making false statements on a naturalization application, with affidavits alleging they had illegally registered to vote, and then, when they later applied for citizenship, falsely claimed they had never registered before. The complaints say the defendants have voted in recent years, but do not face charges specifically related to fraudulent voting.
The defendants face a maximum sentence of five years in prison, according to prosecutors. The accusations were described in initial complaints written by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents. The defendants have not been formally charged and it was not immediately clear whether any of them had obtained the services of an attorney. The federal public defender’s office in Los Angeles did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
A 52-year-old Canadian defendant has been accused of voting illegally twice and then seeking to cancel his registration. The complaint says he has lived in the United States for more than 40 years. A 43-year-old Filipino defendant has resided in the United States since 1992 and has been accused of voting multiple times since 2020.
Experts said it was extraordinary that the DoJ brought these cases in the middle of an election, with federal prosecutors traditionally avoiding taking actions that could be seen as politically motivated or potential interference with an upcoming race. Former prosecutors and defense attorneys said it was particularly infuriating to see the government present the arrests in such a dramatic fashion, releasing mugshots and parading the defendants in front of news cameras.
The Associated Press and other media outlets were on hand for a pre-dawn arrest of the 72-year-old man last month on a quiet residential street, and a Fox News reporter on Monday published photos of two arrests, including one that appeared to be an Amazon worker handcuffed on the sidewalk. Democrats have accused the DoJ of trying to sow doubt about the election results and create a false impression that voter fraud is widespread.
Essayli said the newly arrested defendants were on federal prosecutors’ list of 20,000 voters who may be fraudulently registered, arguing that those cases further support their efforts to stop ballots from being counted. But an immigrant rights group, which has sued the government over its use of federal immigration data to challenge voters, analyzed the list and said in a document filed over the weekend that more than 40% of people flagged as potentially fraudulent voters could not be found on the state’s voter rolls.
The 20,000 names represent a tiny fraction of the more than 23 million registered voters in California.
County election officials who received threatening letters from the DoJ asking them to throw out some ballots also said the lists given to them were riddled with errors.
Asked Monday about the prosecutors’ list, Essayli told reporters that the government used “third-party databases” to identify potentially fraudulent voters, and that the list “may not be 100 percent accurate,” but there was a “very, very high confidence rate.” At a press briefing during the first round of arrests last month, Trent McCotter, the acting assistant U.S. attorney general, said: “There may be some names on there who ultimately are citizens. We’re not perfect, and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us.”
In recent days, the DoJ has also repeatedly threatened to criminally prosecute election officials who process fraudulent ballots, prompting a rebuke from a federal judge Friday, who said that “DoJ’s intimidation, threats, and attempts at coercion daily force election workers to choose between complying with (the DoJ’s) illegal requests or adhering to their duties and thus putting themselves at serious risk of investigation and criminal proceedings”. The judge stopped the administration from continuing to threaten election officials.
Essayli continued his crusade against California’s election even after a federal judge ruled last week that he was “illegally” serving as head of the U.S. attorney’s office since he had not been formally nominated and confirmed by the Senate. The DoJ is appealing this decision.
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