DOJ Details How It Found 20,000 Likely Noncitizens on CA Voter Rolls, Seeks ...

[SVPete]

DOJ Details How It Found 20,000 Likely Noncitizens on CA Voter Rolls, Seeks Emergency Court Order

https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2026/10/19/doj-explains-20000-suspected-noncitizens-ca-voter-roll-emergency-motion-n2208341

The Trump administration is asking a federal court to order election officials in California to set aside any vote-by-mail ballots for the upcoming midterm election returned by people the federal government has identified as "likely non-citizens" and prohibit them from counting those ballots unless the voter's citizenship status is verified.

After announcing that federal criminal charges had been filed against 28 foreign nationals living in California who fraudulently registered to vote in U.S. elections (most of whom actually voted in at least one election) in "Operation Protect the Vote," Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said they'd filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) in the suit filed last week against the State of California, alleging that officials are knowingly allowing noncitizens to vote in the state's elections.

Prior to filing suit, McCotter provided California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan with a thumb drive containing the names, addresses, and dates of birth of more than 20,000 people on the state's voter roll that the DOJ believes are noncitizens and made a few requests. Among them: 1) Not send a ballot for the November election to anyone on the list who hadn't already been sent one; 2) Set aside any ballots returned by people on the list; 3) Not tabulate any ballot returned by people on the list until their citizenship status could be verified; and 3) Verify the citizenship status of all of the people on the list.

California officials basically said, "Up yours" to the DOJ, leading to Monday's filing.
...
How did federal officials arrive at that 20,000 number? California officials have claimed one reason they couldn't check the list was that they needed to know how the feds got the voter roll since they didn't provide it, and another that they needed to first know the feds' methodology. We all know that's bunk, but McCotter explained the process anyway.

So, California has a public voter roll that's available. It doesn't include everyone's detailed information, but it has a list of everyone on the voter roll. DHS has that roll, of course; it's public. They then enriched and cross-referenced that list and that information with other government databases, other public information, to add in more of the kind of personal information, identifying information, that the state of California should have been providing us from the beginning.
...
(S)ubtracted anybody who had any sort of evidence of actually being a citizen. So we looked at State Department records, passport records, Social Security Administration, alien files. We looked at whether someone may have gotten derivative citizenship from a parent, or maybe they were a naturalized citizen. What was left was then manually verified by a different part of the Department of Homeland Security.

County officials in many CA counties and the SecState who is tasked with overseeing their work have been shirking their legally-mandated duty to keep voter rolls "clean" - deaths, moves, ineligibles. It's one-party rule: county officials; Dem SecState; Dem AG; Dem-appointed judges.

[DefiantSix]

I'm sure there are orders of magnitude more than a mere 20,000 non-citizens on the Commiefornia voter rolls, but as Commiefornia is one of the leftist shitholes that are fighting the administration's efforts to audit those rolls, it could be DECADES before DonaldusMagnus is proven correct.

Again.

[SVPete]

I understand the article to mean that these 20K probable ineligibles to have been in Los Angeles County.

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

Likely outcomes:

A) the judge refuses the DOJ's petition

B) Even if granted, California will not set aside any ballots. CA will say all ballots are in one massive pool of votes and there is no way to separate them out. No court will dare to delay election results to sort things out.

[SVPete]

LA election officials admit no independent way to verify voter citizenship

https://nypost.com/2026/10/20/us-news/socal-election-safeguards-questioned-over-voter-citizenship-verification/

Los Angeles election officials have no independent way to verify whether voters are US citizens beyond taking their word for it, according to the city’s top federal prosecutor.

Bill Essayli, First Assistant US Attorney for the Central District of California, blasted the state over the gap in its election safeguards, warning that eligible Americans’ votes “are being diluted” while officials refuse to set aside ballots flagged by federal authorities.

“Los Angeles election officials just told a federal court they have no independent way to verify citizenship beyond what voters attest. (They simply take their word for it.),” Essayli wrote in a post on X, sharing highlighted text from the Justice Department’s lawsuit against California over suspected noncitizens on its voter rolls.

“Under federal law, only citizens may vote in federal elections. Yet California has not acted on the list of 20,000 suspected noncitizens or agreed to set aside their ballots. American citizens’ votes are being diluted in California.”

"No way to verify," means the offocials did not care to try ... unsurprisingly.