DOJ Gives California 48 Hours to Prove Voter Citizenship or Segregate Mail Ballots

The Justice Department has handed California a hard deadline: prove that voters federal officials flagged as possible noncitizens are in fact citizens, or set their mail ballots aside. The demand landed Tuesday in letters to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan, delivered with a 48-hour clock attached.

Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter wrote that the department had provided Logan's office a password-protected thumb drive holding names the federal government believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a vote-by-mail ballot for the Nov. 3 midterm election. He asked officials to review the list within 48 hours and to segregate -- not cancel -- the ballots of anyone whose citizenship cannot be independently confirmed.

Voters on the list who have not yet been mailed a ballot should not receive one until their citizenship is verified, McCotter wrote. Ballots already returned by anyone on the list should not be counted until the same check is complete. He warned that if California cannot carry out the review, the department "will have no choice but to seek emergency relief."

A Federal Push Arriving After Ballots Are Already Out

The letters went to more than one county, not just Los Angeles, and they arrived with California's election already underway. Ballots have been mailed, and county clerks are receiving and pre-processing them now.

State election officials did not immediately respond to the demand. Weber has already pushed back on the federal government's numbers. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed in July that California's voter rolls could hold more than 190,000 noncitizens -- a figure Weber's office said it could not verify and would not act on without more information.

McCotter copied First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, whose office has already sent Logan's office a series of grand jury subpoenas for individual voter records in a criminal investigation into illegal voting. California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office referred questions about possible litigation to Weber and Logan.

The Left Calls the Timing a Legal Problem

Election-law academics who reviewed the letters called the move legally questionable. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the department was violating its own rules by investigating elections this close to Election Day, and that its prior claims have been riddled with errors.

Becker pointed to Nevada, where the administration initially alleged nearly 16,000 noncitizens were registered. After further scrutiny the figure fell to 185 -- and officials determined all of them were citizens.

Rick Hasen, who directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, said he is not aware of anything like this ever happening so close to an election. He said the National Voter Registration Act bars systematic purges of voters within 90 days of an election, and that whether that protection extends to noncitizens is a question currently before the Supreme Court in an Arizona case set for argument in December.

Hasen added that the point of the 90-day rule is to stop eligible voters from being dropped by mistake in the rush before an election -- a risk he said grows when the lists have proven inaccurate elsewhere.

The Administration's Case

The Justice Department defended the demand. In a statement, it said the request "should not be controversial, as the criminal statute is clear: only American citizens may vote in federal elections." It called it a federal crime for noncitizens to vote and said it is simply asking California to ensure that is not happening.

McCotter framed the work as a shared duty. "States are responsible for voter registration, and the Federal Government is responsible for maintaining immigration records to enable verification of citizenship," he wrote. Letting noncitizens vote, he added, "cancels citizen votes."

The letter is the latest step in a broader federal election-integrity campaign. The Civil Rights Division has filed 31 lawsuits to force states to turn over unredacted voter rolls, acknowledging it intends to share that data with Homeland Security to screen for noncitizens. In July, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon warned all 50 states that knowingly leaving noncitizens on the rolls could bring criminal action. And since President Trump took office, the department has criminally charged more than 100 people with voter fraud-related crimes.

The department has lost 26 of those voter-roll lawsuits and has yet to win one. Federal officials have turned to public voter lists and other investigative methods to identify potential noncitizens. An independent analysis found states may have added more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens to their rolls since 2000 through software glitches and clerical errors -- a tiny sliver next to the roughly 174 million registered voters counted in 2024.

What to Watch

California's 48-hour window runs out Thursday. If Weber and Logan do not comply, the Justice Department has signaled it will go to court for emergency relief -- a fight that would land in front of a federal judge with early voting already in motion.

The state has leverage of its own. With ballots in hand and the 90-day purge rule in play, California can argue the segregation order is both impractical and unlawful. Bonta, the state's attorney general, is the official most likely to make that case.

The demand also fits a pattern that reached several states this fall, including a coordinated DHS voter fraud surge in nine states ahead of the midterms. How California answers will set the terms for how far the federal government can push into state election machinery before Nov. 3 -- and for the Arizona citizenship case the Supreme Court takes up in December.