Los Angeles County officials question DOJ list of suspected non-citizens

Sample data showed 38.9% U.S. birth where birthplace was meaningful

Los Angeles County election officials said in court papers on Tuesday that 38.9% of sample records with meaningful birthplace information indicated that the listed people were born in the United States. The filing did not specify how many of the 200 sampled records had meaningful birthplace information.

Aman Bhullar, an official in the Los Angeles clerk and recorder’s office, wrote in a court declaration: “Among the records for which birthplace information was meaningfully reported, 38.9% indicated that they were born in the United States.” A county spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

Of the 20,000 names delivered to Los Angeles County, only about 7,000 had an address in the county, according to the filing. Los Angeles officials analyzed a sample of 200 people from the list.

In his declaration, Bhullar said that forty-three per cent of those on the list had a voter registration record that had been cancelled. Seventy-one per cent of those in the sample had never voted, and 86 people had been mailed a ballot this year.

The Justice Department sent the list last week to Los Angeles County and the California secretary of state. It gave both recipients a 48-hour deadline to segregate ballots cast by anyone on the list unless election officials could verify the person’s citizenship. California election officials refused, and the Justice Department sued California on Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security compiled the list by matching voter rolls with its own non-citizen records. DHS has resisted state demands to disclose that methodology, and experts cited by The Guardian warned that the matching method could be error-prone.

In July, DHS accused Nevada of having as many as 16,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls. DHS officials later sent Nevada election officials a list of 185 people believed to be non-citizens. Nevada officials investigated and said all 185 were in fact citizens.

At a Monday press conference, Acting Deputy Attorney General R Trent McCotter acknowledged there could be citizens on the California list. “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,” he said.

Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels said that a U.S. birthplace on a voter registration form did not establish citizenship. “Just because an alien says on a form that they are a citizen doesn’t make them eligible to vote,” she said.

Pels said the Justice Department notified California that noncitizens were likely registered and asked the state to verify ballots cast by people on the list. “California cannot facilitate the violation of federal law. We notified California that noncitizens are likely registered to vote, and we asked the state to independently verify the citizenship of any ballots cast by people on a list that we provided. It refused to do so. Federal law doesn’t permit this willful blindness,” she added.