Acting deputy attorney general acknowledges DOJ list may include citizens
The Justice Department announced Monday that 28 noncitizens from across California face charges including making false statements in a naturalization application and fraudulently signing up to vote, felonies that could carry five years in prison. The defendants are lawful permanent residents who have legal status in the United States but are not citizens authorized to vote. A department spokesperson said 21 of the 28 cast unlawful ballots, that 11 have already been taken into custody, and that arrests were ongoing. Prosecutors alleged the defendants lied under oath in voter registration applications.
The charges are the latest escalation in the federal government’s ongoing efforts against alleged noncitizen voting. Democrats and voting rights groups say those efforts are part of a strategy by the Trump administration to sow doubt in the results of the upcoming midterm elections. Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, and election experts have raised concerns that the enforcement push could disenfranchise US citizens.
The arrests came days after the Justice Department sued California, demanding that courts block the state from tabulating certain ballots in the November midterms. The department had previously sent Los Angeles County election officials a thumb drive purportedly containing the names of noncitizens who were unlawfully registered to vote, and it demanded that California officials confirm within 48 hours whether those on the list were citizens and set aside the ballots of those who remained unconfirmed. The lawsuit said the department had sent California a list of more than 20,000 people the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens” who were sent ballots by mail.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, has condemned the demands as “outrageous,” saying federal officials have for months made “vague and unsubstantiated allegations” about voter fraud in the state. In a letter to the Justice Department last week, Weber noted that the Department of Homeland Security first claimed in July that more than 190,000 registered voters in the state “may be” noncitizens but has since revised that number down to 20,000 while continuing to refuse to share details about its data and methodology. Weber said that treating the thousands of voters on the DOJ list as ineligible until proven otherwise would violate federal law prohibiting states from systematically removing the names of ineligible voters from voter lists in the lead-up to a federal election. There are 23.1 million registered voters in California, according to recent state figures.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter acknowledged that the government’s list of alleged noncitizen voters in California might not be accurate when pressed by a reporter to provide details about the methodology.
“There may be some names on there who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens. We’re not perfect, and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us,” McCotter said.
On the government’s changing estimates, McCotter said: “Think of it like 190,000 is the ceiling, 20,000 is the floor. Twenty-thousand are the ones we’re the most confident about … 190,000 includes ‘medium confidence’, ‘lower confidence’ – kind of the initial cut that have not been manually verified yet.”
McCotter sent a letter to election officials on Friday threatening to prosecute any official who tabulated a ballot from a noncitizen. Experts have called the threat legally specious and a blatant effort to intimidate officials.
Some federal efforts against alleged noncitizen voting have faltered elsewhere. Last month, Nevada state officials said DHS had wrongly identified 185 people on the state’s voter rolls as noncitizens. Nationwide, the Justice Department said Monday that federal prosecutors have filed charges against a total of 112 people across 20 states in recent weeks for alleged registration offenses and illegal voting.