Federal prosecutors notified Los Angeles County and California election authorities on Friday that processing mail-in ballots cast by approximately 20,000 people the administration has flagged as possible noncitizens could leave those officials open to federal criminal charges as accessories.
The notice, delivered to Los Angeles County Assistant Counsel Peter Bollinger, arrived under three weeks ahead of the November 3 midterm vote, following by a few days the Justice Department's move to give California a 48-hour window to examine a roster of individuals identified as possible noncitizen voters before potential legal proceedings were initiated.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to prevent California from including those ballots in its count. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter stated in a letter published Friday that casting a vote in a federal election as a non-citizen carries criminal penalties under federal law, as does any knowing assistance of that activity. McCotter urged both the county and California's secretary of state to revisit their position on measures that the Trump administration contends are necessary to address voter fraud concerns.
Trump posted the letter to Truth Social alongside a comment predicting that those involved would face lengthy prison terms. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan were listed as recipients on McCotter's original correspondence.
No reply came from the county's legal office when a comment was sought. Weber's office directed reporters to a prior statement in which she described the Justice Department's efforts to access state voter records and remove names from voter rolls as actions that, in her view, work against public confidence in elections rather than protecting them.
A letter McCotter sent Tuesday to Weber and Logan disclosed that federal officials had handed Los Angeles County administrators a password-protected thumb drive listing individuals the government considers likely noncitizens who had received mail-in ballots from California. On Thursday, Los Angeles County Counsel Dawyn R. Harrison stated that the county was not in a position to meet the Justice Department's demands, pointing to the administration's failure to disclose how the list in question had been compiled.
A correspondence dated Friday, bearing McCotter's name, described how the Justice Department drew on a combination of data-matching techniques and what it characterised as "internal immigration records." In July, the administration put forward a figure of more than 275,000 people without citizenship status who appeared on voter rolls, though whether any of them had cast ballots remained unverified.
Errors in citizenship verification have, on a number of documented occasions, led automated systems to misclassify naturalized Americans as foreign nationals. Research across multiple studies points to verified ballot-casting by non-citizens being a notably rare occurrence.
Federal prosecutors have brought a growing number of cases against individuals alleged to have cast ballots without holding US citizenship, with the pace of that activity picking up from July onward.
