LA County clerk declined to review thumb-drive list, citing security concerns
The US Department of Justice sued California on Thursday, asking a federal court to bar the state from tabulating vote-by-mail ballots the department has identified as likely cast by noncitizens in the midterm elections.
Filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California, the lawsuit asks the court to order the state to set aside the ballots and verify each voter’s citizenship status before counting them. “This Court should enjoin California from presently tabulating vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the upcoming federal election until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” the complaint states. The suit asks the court to require California to set aside the flagged vote-by-mail ballots and verify the citizenship of voters the federal government has identified as likely noncitizens before counting their votes.
The complaint came two days after the department sent election officials in Los Angeles County a thumb drive with a handwritten password, purporting to contain a list of people registered to vote who were not US citizens. The department asked county officials to confirm the citizenship of anyone on the list and to set aside their ballots, giving the state 48 hours to act. The department did not detail how the names were identified, according to the Guardian. The lawsuit says the federal government provided the state with more than 20,000 names of likely noncitizens.
Los Angeles County Clerk and Recorder Dean Logan said his office would not review the list, in part because the thumb drive was not considered secure. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, said in a Wednesday statement that the Justice Department had not provided the list of voters to her office. “The [justice department’s] relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” Weber said.
The federal methodology for identifying noncitizens has come under prior scrutiny. Earlier in 2026, the Department of Homeland Security said there could be as many as 278,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in four states — more than 190,000 in California and about 16,000 in Nevada. DHS officials refused to share their methodology with Nevada election officials, the Guardian reported, and later turned over 185 names of people the agency had strong reason to believe were noncitizens. Nevada officials investigated and found that every one of the 185 was a US citizen.
UCLA election law scholar Richard Hasen described the Justice Department’s California effort as “a nice publicity stunt that gets attention for [the justice department] and reinforces the notion among the president’s most ardent supporters that California is not doing enough to combat voter fraud.” Hasen wrote in a blog post that the department has no standing to direct state and local officials to remove voters from the rolls in the midst of an election. He noted that the National Voter Registration Act bars systematic purges of ineligible voters in the 90-day period before a federal election. “The purpose of this provision, unsurprisingly, is to stop false positives, that is the removal of eligible voters who are mistakenly flagged as noncitizens,” Hasen wrote. “A rushed process would almost certainly lead to disenfranchisement.”
The request to block tabulation comes amid concerns that President Donald Trump and his allies will interfere in the counting of votes in the midterm elections, in which Republicans are expected to lose seats in Congress.