DOJ Charges 28 in California over Unlawful Voting, Warns Election Workers Could Also Face Prosecution
The US Justice Department has charged 28 individuals in California with unlawful voting and other election-related crimes. In Monday's announcement, the department did not rule out prosecuting election workers who are 'processing the ballots' there — deepening the clash between the federal government and California's state authorities ahead of next month's midterm elections.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told a press conference on Monday that some of those charged are green card holders in the United States. They were charged with 'some combination of unlawful voting by an alien, a false claim of US citizenship in order to vote or register to vote, and knowingly depriving the residents of California of a fair and impartial election process,' he said.
The 28 are on a list of 20,000 names the DOJ sent to California last week — people the department suspects of being illegally in the United States, to whom the state nevertheless provided mail-in ballots for next month's midterm election. On Thursday, the DOJ sued California for failing to review the list and act on it.
McCotter told Monday's briefing: 'After we provided that information, California and L.A. didn't come back and say, “No, you're wrong. These folks are citizens.” They didn't say, “Actually, let's work together and try to figure out whether they're citizens.” Instead, L.A. County, in particular, said that they would not even attempt to open the list because of concerns about IT integrity.'
The Los Angeles county clerk said in a statement last week that they were refusing to access the contents of the thumb drive the DOJ provided — delivered to the office with a password attached on a sticky note — because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols.
'We do not consider the device a secure medium,' L.A. County Clerk Dean Logan said in the statement. He added that the letter did not specify the number of individuals involved or describe the information contained in the records.
California officials have characterized the DOJ's request as legally baseless and a last-ditch effort by the Trump administration to intervene in the state's election process, despite facing more than two dozen straight losses in court over the past year in its efforts to compel states to hand over their voter rolls.
The scale matters too. More than 16 million votes were cast in California in the last presidential election, and more than 150 million people voted nationwide. President Donald Trump and Republican leaders have characterized noncitizen voting as a pressing threat to free and fair elections, but experts maintain that cases of non-citizen voting are extraordinarily rare.
McCotter said the Department of Homeland Security arrived at the list of 20,000 names by cross-referencing California's publicly available voter rolls with 'other government databases' and 'other public information.' Anyone with any evidence of actually being a citizen was then subtracted — checking State Department records, passport records, the Social Security Administration and alien files, and whether someone may have gained derivative citizenship from a parent or been naturalized. The remaining 20,000 names, 'likely not citizens of the United States,' were manually verified, he said.
The reliability of that method has been questioned before. The DOJ previously sent Nevada officials a list of 185 individuals DHS said were potential non-citizens on that state's voter rolls — but Nevada officials determined that everyone on the list was a lawful US citizen.
On the possible prosecution of election workers, McCotter said: 'I'm not going to prejudge or pre-announce any sort of criminal case, but this is not an unusual doctrine. The idea that even if you don't do something yourself illegally, that if you help someone else do it or knowingly help them, that could lead to charges for that person. This is a very well-established legal doctrine, aiding and abetting. It applies to all federal crimes, not just elections.'
The arrests were made as part of Operation Protect the Vote. US First Assistant Attorney Bill Essayli claimed that 'many' of those arrested voted in prior elections. 'Just in the last seven weeks alone, the department has now charged 113 people across 20 different states with illegal voting or illegal registration,' Essayli said, adding that the DOJ is pursuing thousands of 'similar cases' around the nation. As the midterms approach, the legal fight over voter rolls looks set to intensify.
