The US Justice Department on Tuesday gave California officials 48 hours to review a list of alleged noncitizen voters or face legal action, according to two letters reviewed by Reuters, part of an unprecedented effort to find evidence of voter fraud ahead of next month’s elections.
The letters mark an escalation of the Trump administration’s attempts to pressure states over alleged voting by non-US citizens and signal the Justice Department may be prepared to challenge ballots in the weeks leading up to the November 3 election, when Republicans will be defending their narrow majorities in Congress. Experts said the numbers were too small relative to the country’s 170 million registered voters to affect elections. The letters demand the state refuse to send ballots to those on the list until their citizenship status has been confirmed. Justice Department spokeswoman Kiersten Pels confirmed the existence of the letters in a statement to Reuters, adding: “The department will take all necessary legal action to protect election integrity and ensure compliance with federal law.
Though states may have added more than 30,000 noncitizens to their voter rolls since 2000 due to software glitches and clerical errors, Reuters found in September, it was unclear how many had cast a ballot. The Justice Department under President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that voting by non-US citizens is widespread, despite multiple studies showing it is rare.
Voters in question who have already received ballots should have their ballot “segregated” once they are mailed back; ballots already returned should not be tabulated “until citizenship has been determined,” the letters stipulate.
Reuters reported last month that the Department of Homeland Security was using a commercial data broker to find sensitive voter information not included in publicly available rolls, which officials and experts warned could lead to citizens being falsely flagged as illegal voters and potentially detained. The department’s Civil Rights Division has demanded nonpublic voter data, including voters’ Social Security numbers or dates of birth, from nearly all states as part of its hunt for noncitizens on state rolls. It has sued 30 Democratic- and Republican-led states that refused to hand over their rolls, but has lost 26 of those cases without winning one.
