Less than two weeks before the midterm elections, the Justice Department has warned election officials across California that they could face federal scrutiny if they refuse to help identify suspected noncitizens on the voter rolls and set aside their mail ballots pending citizenship checks, Reuters reported.
The letters, dated Friday and signed by Bilal Essayli, first assistant US attorney for the Central District of California, gave local officials 48 hours to help determine the citizenship status of individuals on federal lists. Each letter carries county figures drawn from a previously distributed list of 20,000 people the department alleges are noncitizens registered to vote: 1,754 in Orange County, 1,355 in Riverside County, 1,133 in San Bernardino County, 334 in Ventura County, 180 in Santa Barbara County and 63 in San Luis Obispo County, with a separate letter to Contra Costa County listing 407. For anyone whose status cannot be confirmed, the department asked counties to segregate, not cancel, their vote by mail ballots until citizenship is determined. Officials who knowingly counted ballots from people identified as noncitizens risked becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime, Essayli wrote.
The New York Times reported the letters went to every county in the state, and that they follow a Justice Department suit last week seeking to pre-empt the counting of more than 20,000 mail ballots in California, with a hearing scheduled next week and the department urging an appeals court to decide the issue this weekend. That makes California the second election administration front opened in a week, after the Alaska certification suit updated elsewhere in this edition.
Two rural registrars questioned the list itself. In Inyo County, the registrar said her list contained two people, neither of whom had been issued a ballot and neither of whom had ever voted in California. In Mendocino County, the clerk recorder said the list she received was completely wrong and belonged to another county. Those responses do not settle the statewide figures, but they are the first county level checks on the federal list to reach print, and they point to the question the hearing next week will turn on: the accuracy of the underlying list, not only the department’s authority to demand the segregation.