By the time someone is prosecuted for illegally voting, the ballot has already been counted. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice is trying to get ahead of that problem in California, demanding that election officials verify suspected noncitizens’ eligibility before counting their ballots in this year’s midterms.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent letters Tuesday to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County election chief Dean Logan, giving officials 48 hours to implement a verification process. DOJ supplied the officials a password-protected thumb drive identifying people it believes are likely noncitizens "who were sent a vote-by-mail ballot from California to participate in the November 2026 federal election."
That last sentence deserves emphasis. This effort about suspected noncitizens the DOJ claims have been sent a vote-by-mail ballot for this upcoming election so that election fraud can be prevented. That's especially important this year since California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed "election interference" laws attempting to prevent federal investigators from looking into election fraud after the fact.
For listed individuals whose citizenship cannot be verified, McCotter asked officials to segregate returned ballots and refrain from tabulating them, and to withhold ballots that haven’t yet been mailed:
We request that you review the list within 48 hours to determine whether any citizens are listed. For individuals whom you cannot independently confirm citizenship status, we reguest that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate-not cancel-those individuals' vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined. If individuals on the list have not yet been sent a vote-by-mail ballot, take all immediate and reasonable steps to not provide a ballot to those individuals until we confirm their citizenship status. If a ballot for any individual on the list has been returned, instruct the appropriate elections official to not verify the signature and/or tabulate the ballot until citizenship can be determined. This nrocess will nrotect American citizens' votes while preventing noncitizens from participating in the federal election in violation of federal law.
California has had months to examine the federal government’s concerns. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin first contacted Weber on July 16 about suspected noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls.
In her July 23 response, McCotter noted that Weber didn’t deny that noncitizens were registered to vote in California or address whether they would receive automatically mailed ballots. She didn’t provide findings establishing that the individuals flagged by DHS were citizens, either. Instead, she questioned the reliability of DHS’s information and requested its methodology, data sources, and an explanation of how it obtained California’s registration list.
Unfortunately for Weber, the federal government doesn't have to tell her how it obtained California's voter registration list. That list, with Social Security numbers redacted, is available to qualified political parties, researchers, campaigns, and advertisers (which is how you receive those annoying mailers and targeted texts and how parties run get-out-the-vote activities). What likely happened is that the DOJ obtained the voter registration list after Weber's 60-day report of Registration, the last official update prior to the midterm, then ran that against the list Mullin had of noncitizens suspected of being registered to vote to ensure that those names were still there.
And we already know California’s registration system has been exploited.
As I reported in February, former Lodi Councilman Shakir Khan pleaded no contest to 14 election fraud felonies related to the 2020 general election. Investigators found that he registered noncitizens living overseas, including his brother in Pakistan. San Joaquin County’s sheriff confirmed that a Pakistani citizen living in Pakistan voted in California’s 2020 election.
Those vulnerabilities extend beyond California, as we've repeatedly seen.
Officials need to determine who is eligible while there’s still time to prevent unlawful votes from being counted. Californians deserve that work to be done before another prosecution tells them what went wrong in an election that’s already over.
Editor’s Note: Republicans are fighting for election integrity by requiring proper identification to vote. It's common sense, yet Democrats are spreading lies about the impact of such a measure.
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