California election officials question DOJ voter list, keep counting

Justice Department says it is not requesting a purge of voters

Local election officials across California were confused and frustrated after receiving letters from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department demanding that county registrars sequester ballots the federal government believes were sent to noncitizen voters ahead of the midterm elections. Some clerks said they would proceed with counting ballots, and several officials questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s list of 20,000 voters.

The letters, sent Friday, asked for sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, on roughly 20,000 voters. The federal government set a 48-hour deadline to provide the information and warned that legal action could be taken against any official who knowingly counted a noncitizen’s vote. It is illegal for noncitizens to register to vote or cast a ballot, the Associated Press report said. The roughly 20,000 figure describes the number of voters about whom the letters sought information, not a count of confirmed noncitizen voters.

Napa County Registrar John Tuteur, the registrar of voters for Napa County in California’s wine country, said he and other election officials who spoke to The Associated Press on Saturday had already started to count ballots that have trickled in from the state’s 23 million registered voters. “We’re not changing anything we’re doing. We’re proceeding with the election,” he said.

Tuteur said two uniformed Department of Homeland Security officers delivered a letter to his office late Friday afternoon. The letter included the names of 42 people the federal government accused of being noncitizens illegally registered to vote. Roughly 86,000 people are registered to vote across the county of over 130,000 people, Tuteur said, and approximately 11,000 people had already cast a mail-in ballot as of Friday. In larger counties like Los Angeles, that number had already reached over 331,000 counted mail-in votes.

Tuteur said his employees and relatives were worried about what could come next. “My family’s upset, worried about what’s going to happen to me,” he said. “All of this is simply meant to raise huge doubts about the integrity of this election.”

The letter sent to Clerk-Recorder Kim Grady’s office in rural Amador County listed four people allegedly illegally registered to vote in the county. Grady was waiting on more guidance from the state about what she should do and said she was not sure whether she would get clarity before the deadline.

Department of Justice spokeswoman Kiersten Pels emphasized in a statement on Saturday that the department was explicitly “not requesting a purge, cancellation of registrations, or any programmatic action.” Instead, Pels wrote, federal officials were asking for collaboration to “ensure the most secure election in California history.”

California’s attorney general’s office said the letters contained errors. Mendocino County officials, for example, received a list of people who were not residents there, according to the state’s court filing.

The letters followed a federal lawsuit filed Oct. 15, roughly three weeks before the elections, asking a judge to bar the state from counting mail-in ballots from people the federal government had identified as likely noncitizens. A panel of 9th Circuit appeals court judges will hear arguments Sunday about whether California can be compelled to comply with the federal government’s demands.

The Friday letters came on the heels of a statewide sweep by federal authorities on Monday, in which 28 people from the list of 20,000 were charged with illegally registering to vote. Some were also charged with illegally voting and lying on naturalization paperwork. Those charges could lead to years in prison.

Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said clerks who did not comply with the government’s demands could face prosecution as well. “The letters speak for themselves. Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” Essayli said in a statement.

The administration has insisted that immigrants voting is a major problem nationwide, but the practice is quite rare, as even the administration’s own investigations have shown, according to the Associated Press. Earlier this month, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced federal charges against 10 people in Minnesota alleged to have voted illegally over the last three elections, a period in which more than 8 million ballots were cast in the state. Essayli said on Monday that even a small number of illegal voters could “dilute” the vote and undermine confidence in elections.

Some election officials who spoke to The Associated Press on Saturday questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s list of 20,000 voters. “I expect this accusation to fall apart like we saw recently in Nevada,” said Kristin B. Connelly, the Contra Costa County clerk-recorder and registrar of voters. She referred to remarks President Donald Trump made in July, when he claimed the neighboring state had 1,500 noncitizen voters on its rolls. After his administration was asked to identify them, the number of actual registered noncitizens turned out to be zero.

Officials in Los Angeles County, who are named as defendants in the federal lawsuit, echoed Connelly’s concerns about the federal government’s data. A preliminary analysis of 200 names from the statewide list of 20,000 found that over 40% had canceled registrations, according to a court filing from county officials on Wednesday. More than 70% of that sample had no voting history whatsoever, and nearly 4 in 10 were born in the United States.