Yesterday, the Trump administration sauntered into federal court in Los Angeles and asked a judge to order California not to count roughly 20,000 ballots flagged by an unnamed “third-party software” using a commercially available list of registered voters. The feds want the state to toss those ballots in a pile, leaving them uncounted until such time as somebody, somewhere proves they were cast by U.S. citizens.
The drama began Tuesday when Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter fired off letters to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan giving the state 48 hours to “segregate—not cancel” the ballots of people on a list DOJ hand-delivered to Logan’s office on a password-protected thumb drive.
Logan declined to stick a random thumb drive into LA’s election database, which the government describes as “demonstrating a total lack of commitment to work with the Federal Government to protect the integrity of our elections.” And Secretary Weber noted that the Department of Homeland Security has been pretty cagey about showing its work — particularly since DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin originally put the number of “non-citizens registered to vote in California” at 190,832. The tally is now “over 20,000,” or “around 20,000,” or “nearly 20,000,” depending on which paragraph of the complaint you’re reading.
“Given the many high-profile examples of states purging US citizens from their voter rolls based on DHS/SAVE data, SOS immediately requested written information about their methodology and data sources to back up their claims,” she wrote. “They refused and provided California with nothing.”
When the 48 hours was up, the DOJ filed its complaint, asking the court to enjoin California “from tabulating in federal elections vote-by-mail ballots received from individuals identified by the Federal Government as likely noncitizens until those individuals’ citizenship status can be verified.”
The reasoning is bad …
Under California law, every registered voter receives a ballot in the mail. The DOJ’s theory is that the state law is preempted by 18 U.S.C. § 611, which makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote. By mailing ballots to every registered voter and then counting them “without verifying citizenship in collaboration with the Federal Government,” California is allegedly frustrating the purpose of § 611.
To get there, DOJ dusts off Norwood v. Harrison, a 1973 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that lending free textbooks to segregation academies amounted to illegal discrimination by the state of Mississippi itself.
“Because California cannot pass a statute allowing noncitizens to vote in a federal election, it also cannot induce, encourage, promote, or knowingly facilitate noncitizen voting,” the DOJ extrapolates here.
But § 611 is a criminal statute aimed at noncitizens. It says nothing about how states register voters, verify eligibility, or count ballots. And the standard DOJ wants a court to override is one Congress wrote itself.
The complaint demands that California verify eligibility “beyond relying on unverified statements of citizenship necessary to registering.” That “unverified statement” is the sworn attestation on the federal voter registration form created by the National Voter Registration Act. In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, the Supreme Court held that states must “accept and use” that form and cannot demand additional documentary proof of citizenship.
So DOJ’s position is that federal law preempts California from complying with federal law.
… And the facts are worse.
The administration already tried this ploy in Nevada, albeit without involving the court.
On July 16, Secretary Mullin said there might be “as many as” 15,903 noncitizens on the state’s rolls. When the state asked how DHS got that number, officials conceded on an August 13 call that they’d identified 185 people, working from a July 2025 copy of Nevada’s public voter file. DHS then sent over 185 “voter case numbers.”
When Nevada asked for names and dates of birth to verify, a DHS official replied that the agency would “prefer to limit our information sharing to just providing you the voter ID from your public voter list.”
But as Nevada’s Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott explained, “A single voter registration number may belong to multiple individuals.” DHS countered that it would supply a “refined list” if only Nevada would hand over its voters’ “federal enumerators,” i.e., Social Security numbers — the very information 26 courts have already said that states cannot be forced to disgorge to the feds.
Nevada eventually managed to check and found zero evidence that any of the 185 voters flagged were non-citizens. And there’s no reason to believe that DHS’s California list is any more accurate.
The DOJ says that California’s voter roster “is made available for purchase,” but concedes that the commercial product “typically do[es] not contain complete information on an individual,” so USCIS ran it through “third-party software” to sort matches into “high, medium, or low confidence.” The final list of “likely” non-citizens was compiled by USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS), working with Homeland Security Investigations as part of a “multiagency and multilevel review.” But FDNS employees describe it somewhat differently.
According to a whistleblower disclosure last month publicized by Senators Alex Padilla and Chuck Schumer, FDNS staff were abruptly diverted to an “Unlawful Voter Initiative” that has been “using highly questionable data methods to identify purported unlawful voters.” Personnel were handed “unreliable DHS voter data of dubious origins, that is compiled with ‘supplemental magic,’” and were “required to accept the data even when they believe it to be inaccurate.” The whistleblower alleges that FDNS staff even accessed state voter-lookup sites by impersonating voters.
But the requested relief is batshit!
Based on this stellar record, the Trump administration demands that California pull 20,000 votes out of the millions which are already coming in and dump them in a pile to be verified … eventually.
The complaint concedes that “it is not practicable or feasible for the United States to investigate before the 2026 election concludes thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of individuals.” The federal government, which does have custody of immigration records, couldn’t possibly check these 20,000 names before the election. Instead, the state of California, which is in the middle of trying to actually run that election, should do it, but without the immigration records or matching data, and without relying on the one form of proof Congress says counts.
This is a transparent effort to disenfranchise thousands of voters — or, failing that, to discredit the tally ahead of what looks to be a Democratic blowout. DOJ cannot possibly think the courts will let them selectively purge state voter rolls just 18 days before the midterms, particularly when the National Voter Registration Act imposes a 90-day quiet period before elections. Which is probably why, as of this writing, they haven’t even bothered to seek emergency relief.
US v. California [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
The post DOJ Sues To Impose Bespoke 20,000 Disenfranchisement List On California appeared first on Above the Law.
Yesterday, the Trump administration sauntered into federal court in Los Angeles and asked a judge to order California not to count roughly 20,000 ballots flagged by an unnamed “third-party software” using a commercially available list of registered voters. The feds want the state to toss those ballots in a pile, leaving them uncounted until such time as somebody, somewhere proves they were cast by U.S. citizens.
The drama began Tuesday when Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter fired off letters to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan giving the state 48 hours to “segregate—not cancel” the ballots of people on a list DOJ hand-delivered to Logan’s office on a password-protected thumb drive.
Logan declined to stick a random thumb drive into LA’s election database, which the government describes as “demonstrating a total lack of commitment to work with the Federal Government to protect the integrity of our elections.” And Secretary Weber noted that the Department of Homeland Security has been pretty cagey about showing its work — particularly since DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin originally put the number of “non-citizens registered to vote in California” at 190,832. The tally is now “over 20,000,” or “around 20,000,” or “nearly 20,000,” depending on which paragraph of the complaint you’re reading.
“Given the many high-profile examples of states purging US citizens from their voter rolls based on DHS/SAVE data, SOS immediately requested written information about their methodology and data sources to back up their claims,” she wrote. “They refused and provided California with nothing.”
When the 48 hours was up, the DOJ filed its complaint, asking the court to enjoin California “from tabulating in federal elections vote-by-mail ballots received from individuals identified by the Federal Government as likely noncitizens until those individuals’ citizenship status can be verified.”
Under California law, every registered voter receives a ballot in the mail. The DOJ’s theory is that the state law is preempted by 18 U.S.C. § 611, which makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote. By mailing ballots to every registered voter and then counting them “without verifying citizenship in collaboration with the Federal Government,” California is allegedly frustrating the purpose of § 611.
To get there, DOJ dusts off Norwood v. Harrison, a 1973 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that lending free textbooks to segregation academies amounted to illegal discrimination by the state of Mississippi itself.
“Because California cannot pass a statute allowing noncitizens to vote in a federal election, it also cannot induce, encourage, promote, or knowingly facilitate noncitizen voting,” the DOJ extrapolates here.
But § 611 is a criminal statute aimed at noncitizens. It says nothing about how states register voters, verify eligibility, or count ballots. And the standard DOJ wants a court to override is one Congress wrote itself.
The complaint demands that California verify eligibility “beyond relying on unverified statements of citizenship necessary to registering.” That “unverified statement” is the sworn attestation on the federal voter registration form created by the National Voter Registration Act. In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, the Supreme Court held that states must “accept and use” that form and cannot demand additional documentary proof of citizenship.
So DOJ’s position is that federal law preempts California from complying with federal law.
The administration already tried this ploy in Nevada, albeit without involving the court.
On July 16, Secretary Mullin said there might be “as many as” 15,903 noncitizens on the state’s rolls. When the state asked how DHS got that number, officials conceded on an August 13 call that they’d identified 185 people, working from a July 2025 copy of Nevada’s public voter file. DHS then sent over 185 “voter case numbers.”
When Nevada asked for names and dates of birth to verify, a DHS official replied that the agency would “prefer to limit our information sharing to just providing you the voter ID from your public voter list.”
But as Nevada’s Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott explained, “A single voter registration number may belong to multiple individuals.” DHS countered that it would supply a “refined list” if only Nevada would hand over its voters’ “federal enumerators,” i.e., Social Security numbers — the very information 26 courts have already said that states cannot be forced to disgorge to the feds.
Nevada eventually managed to check and found zero evidence that any of the 185 voters flagged were non-citizens. And there’s no reason to believe that DHS’s California list is any more accurate.
The DOJ says that California’s voter roster “is made available for purchase,” but concedes that the commercial product “typically do[es] not contain complete information on an individual,” so USCIS ran it through “third-party software” to sort matches into “high, medium, or low confidence.” The final list of “likely” non-citizens was compiled by USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS), working with Homeland Security Investigations as part of a “multiagency and multilevel review.” But FDNS employees describe it somewhat differently.
According to a whistleblower disclosure last month publicized by Senators Alex Padilla and Chuck Schumer, FDNS staff were abruptly diverted to an “Unlawful Voter Initiative” that has been “using highly questionable data methods to identify purported unlawful voters.” Personnel were handed “unreliable DHS voter data of dubious origins, that is compiled with ‘supplemental magic,’” and were “required to accept the data even when they believe it to be inaccurate.” The whistleblower alleges that FDNS staff even accessed state voter-lookup sites by impersonating voters.
Based on this stellar record, the Trump administration demands that California pull 20,000 votes out of the millions which are already coming in and dump them in a pile to be verified … eventually.
The complaint concedes that “it is not practicable or feasible for the United States to investigate before the 2026 election concludes thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of individuals.” The federal government, which does have custody of immigration records, couldn’t possibly check these 20,000 names before the election. Instead, the state of California, which is in the middle of trying to actually run that election, should do it, but without the immigration records or matching data, and without relying on the one form of proof Congress says counts.
This is a transparent effort to disenfranchise thousands of voters — or, failing that, to discredit the tally ahead of what looks to be a Democratic blowout. DOJ cannot possibly think the courts will let them selectively purge state voter rolls just 18 days before the midterms, particularly when the National Voter Registration Act imposes a 90-day quiet period before elections. Which is probably why, as of this writing, they haven’t even bothered to seek emergency relief.
US v. California [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
