By Andrew Goudsward and Luc Cohen
WASHINGTON, Oct 15 (Reuters) – The US Justice Department sued California on Thursday, asking a federal judge to block the state from counting mail ballots for the November 3 midterm elections from more than 20,000 voters the Trump administration alleges are likely noncitizens.
The lawsuit marks the latest effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to boost the federal government’s role in elections ahead of the midterms, with his Republican Party locked in a tight battle to retain control of both houses of Congress.
The US Constitution assigns the responsibility of administering elections to individual states, though the federal government has some oversight role.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that voting by noncitizens – which is illegal – is widespread, despite multiple studies showing it is rare. A Reuters investigation published in July found that just 129 people had been prosecuted for noncitizen voting since the statute criminalizing it passed in 1996. The Justice Department has ramped up such prosecutions in recent months.
In the lawsuit filed in federal court in Los Angeles, the Justice Department sought a court order preventing California from “tabulating in federal elections vote-by-mail ballots received” from more than 20,000 voters until their immigration status is verified.
Reuters previously reported that the department sent California a letter giving it a 48-hour deadline on Tuesday to review the list of alleged noncitizen voters. The list was provided on a thumb drive.
CALIFORNIA SAYS DOJ SEEKS CHAOS
The lawsuit marks an escalation in the federal government’s pressure on state election officials over alleged noncitizen voting.
The Justice Department has warned election officials in all 50 states that they could face criminal prosecution if they knowingly allowed noncitizens to remain on their voter rolls or cast ballots. It has sued 30 states and Washington DC for refusing to provide complete voter rolls including voters’ sensitive personal data, but has lost 26 of those cases so far without winning one.
In Thursday’s lawsuit against California, the Justice Department said the Department of Homeland Security had identified the 20,000 alleged noncitizens by comparing voter rolls to its own internal databases.
Voting rights activists have expressed concern that many citizens who are naturalized could be wrongly flagged as noncitizens due to outdated DHS data.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan, who were named as defendants in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a statement on Wednesday about the letter, Weber said California’s safeguards against noncitizen voting were robust.
“The USDOJ’s relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” Weber said.
NONCITIZENS HAVE BEEN REGISTERED THROUGH ERRORS
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. Experts said the numbers were too small relative to the country’s 170 million registered voters to affect elections.
Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on election law, said the DOJ’s request would potentially cause California to violate a federal law barring states from conducting mass purges of voter rolls within 90 days of an election.
The Trump administration has argued in another case that such restrictions should not apply to removal of noncitizens because they were not legally authorized to register in the first place.
Hasen said the DOJ lawsuit would likely face legal hurdles.
“The federal government doesn’t have any business directly telling states what ballots they can or cannot send out or not count,” he said. “I just don’t see the federal authority to do that over a state.”
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward in Washington and Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Michelle Nichols, Matthew Lewis and David Gregorio)
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