20,000 Suspect Ballots: DOJ Threatens California Officials With Criminal Prosecution
October 17, 2026 · Frisian News
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The Justice Department sued California after the state refused to review a list of 20,000 suspected noncitizen voters, then warned county officials the next day that counting those ballots could bring federal criminal prosecution.
Twenty thousand suspected noncitizens received California mail-in ballots for the November 3 midterm election, the Justice Department said when it sued the state on Thursday. The next day it raised the stakes further, warning county officials that counting those ballots could bring criminal prosecution.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter signed the warning letter, addressed to the Los Angeles County Counsel's office and copied to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and LA County Registrar Dean Logan. "Noncitizen voting in a federal election is a federal crime, and knowingly facilitating such conduct is equally unlawful," McCotter wrote, in language obtained by the Associated Press. Officials who "knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens," he added, "risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime."
The confrontation began earlier in the week when the DOJ sent county offices a password-protected thumb drive containing 20,000 names compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, with a 48-hour deadline to review the list. California did not meet it. Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan said his office would not open the drive because doing so would conflict with "established data privacy and information security protocols" and because the county did not consider the device "a secure medium." The federal lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California, asks a court to block those ballots from being counted until citizenship can be confirmed.
Weber said the DOJ never sent the list to her office and provided no verifiable basis for its claims. She called the demands "unprecedented measures that threaten thousands of Californians' right to vote, based on unverifiable information or methodology that you still fail to explain or provide," and described the situation as "an emergency of the DOJ's creation." Los Angeles federal prosecutor Bill Essayli took the opposite view. "California election officials were given an opportunity to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls and to sequester ballots returned from suspected ineligible voters," he said. "They refused."
The legal ground under the push looks unstable. The DOJ's Civil Rights Division has filed 31 lawsuits seeking to compel states to hand over voter rolls and, according to CBS News, has not won one. A federal judge in Florida ruled this month that the federal law criminalising noncitizen voting was unconstitutional, finding voter qualifications a matter for the states. A second federal judge ruled that the DOJ had unlawfully sought voter rolls to cross-check against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, which numerous reports have found capable of flagging citizens as noncitizens. The Supreme Court rejected a Trump administration effort in September to restrict mail-in voting for November 3.
The numbers behind the administration's broader claim have also shrunk under scrutiny. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged in July, as reported by the New York Post, that as many as 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote across California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Federal authorities then flagged 1,500 supposed noncitizen voters in Nevada. A subsequent review found zero registered noncitizens among those identified. Nationwide, the Justice Department has charged roughly 50 people with voting illegally as noncitizens, the Guardian reported, out of more than 227 million registered voters.
Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor, said the letter "ups the ante by threatening election officials with potential criminal prosecution." Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general now at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, was more direct. "Courts haven't been buying what DOJ has been selling," he said, "and nothing in this letter is calibrated to change course."
The DOJ has zero legal victories across 31 voter-roll cases.
Published October 17, 2026 · Frisian News