The Justice Department filed a groundbreaking lawsuit Thursday, asking a judge to bar California from counting ballots cast by roughly 20,000 people the government believes to be noncitizens, unless the state takes steps to verify they are, in fact, valid voters.
Trump administration officials said they provided the list of names to election officials in California this week and gave them a 48-hour deadline to vet the list.
When nothing was done, the administration turned to the courts to try to block the state from letting the ballots be tabulated.
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California uses a vote-by-mail system that sends ballots to the address associated with every registered voter. The Justice Department said that means live ballots were already sent to the suspected noncitizens.
“The law is clear, aliens in the United States cannot vote in federal elections,” said acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter. “What our complaint alleges is that California is facilitating unlawful voting by knowingly allowing noncitizens to vote. This needs to stop.”
“The United States thus sues California to ensure that only American citizens’ ballots are counted in the ongoing federal election,” Andrew Darlington, a Justice Department lawyer, said in the complaint filed in federal court in Los Angeles.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, in a letter to the Justice Department this week responding to the list, called the demand to refuse to count already mailed ballots “unprecedented” and the timeline for action was impossible.
“This is an emergency of the DOJ’s creation,” she wrote. “California’s election administration will continue to be governed by applicable federal and state law, not by unsubstantiated claims and outrageous demands.”
She also questioned the government’s methodology for identifying noncitizens, calling it unreliable.
Mr. Darlington, the Justice Department lawyer who signed the complaint, detailed the process used.
He said the Department of Homeland Security came up with the list of “nearly” 20,000 names by taking a list of California voters, running it through third-party databases to match those names to identities, and then checking them against government files.
The Homeland Security Department’s citizenship agency searches for people with immigration files associated with them, then seeks evidence that they have achieved citizenship. Those who have not are considered good candidates for noncitizenship.
That list was forwarded to Homeland Security Investigations, the department’s investigative arm, which reviewed it and produced the final list.
That was given to California on Tuesday.
“The state knows that noncitizens might be registered to vote, and it knows the names of such individuals. But it still intends to count their vote without verifying the voter’s citizenship,” Mr. Darlington wrote in the lawsuit.
The dispute arose less than three weeks before Election Day, when seats in Congress are up for grabs, as are state offices in California.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said the federal government has no legal leverage because the Constitution charges the states, not the federal government, with vetting voters’ credentials.
He called the demand to block 20,000 ballots “a totally unprecedented request that should scare the hell out of every American.”
“This is a sad, desperate attempt by [President] Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day,” he said.
Federal law prohibits noncitizens from casting ballots in elections for national office. But a federal judge in Florida recently called that law into question, saying that because states set voter qualifications, Congress lacks the power to criminalize eligibility.
That decision has been appealed.
In the past, California has insisted it does not have a problem with noncitizen voting.
When The Washington Times in 2024 sought records of noncitizen voters booted from the rolls, the California secretary of state’s office reported that it did not “have any data to report on instances of noncitizens voting or being incorrectly registered and removed from the voting rolls.”
Local jurisdictions, though, have acknowledged the issue.
Last year, Orange County notified the federal government that it had removed 17 people from its voter rolls after realizing they were not citizens. The county said it investigated after receiving complaints from noncitizens about receiving ballots in the mail under California’s all-mail election system.
Earlier this year, the Homeland Security Department said it identified 190,000 names of potential noncitizens in California — a much higher number than the 20,000 cited on the list provided to the state this week.
Ms. Weber, in her letter, said the department never defended that higher number despite her prodding.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, in a statement Thursday, called his department’s analysis “preliminary” and said the process was “ongoing.” Still, he called the number of names flagged “significant.”
“This is completely unacceptable — as even one noncitizen vote cancels out the ballot of an American citizen and undermines our elections,” he said.
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