Election officials expect Trump administration pressure over voter rolls to continue despite court setbacks

With Election Day over, election officials and civil rights attorneys in the United States are preparing for the Trump administration to continue its search for noncitizens on state voter rolls, even though recent court rulings have created new obstacles.

In the weeks before Election Day, the administration escalated its hunt for voter fraud and its pressure on election officials, especially in California, to crack down on illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens.

James Williams, county executive for California's Santa Clara County, told NPR: 'It's clear that there is this drive to try to conjure up facts that just don't exist. I don't think that's going to change. So we fully are prepared to continue to deal with this.'

In recent weeks, federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against dozens of people accused of voting or registering to vote without being a citizen. Yet compared with overall numbers of voters, noncitizen voting is exceptionally rare, and the administration has touted what turned out to be grossly inflated numbers of noncitizens on state voter rolls since summer.

In mid-October, federal officials alleged they had found 20,000 'likely' noncitizens on California's voter rolls. The Department of Justice sued the state to try to force election officials not to count ballots of voters whose citizenship had not been verified. A federal judge and a federal appeals court rejected the requests, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.

While the lawsuit was pending, U.S. attorneys in California sent grand jury subpoenas to several counties in the days leading up to Election Day, asking for records related to how local officials responded to the Justice Department's demands. The department dropped its lawsuit last week but has not rescinded the subpoenas.

U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a Thursday press conference: 'We have ongoing cases and investigations in various states surrounding voter process. We are actively, and will continue to investigate election integrity cases criminally and civilly.'

Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at Campaign Legal Center, told NPR: 'Do I think they will still keep at this? I do, but there are just a lot of court losses that are going to be really difficult for them to maneuver around. They've hit substantial roadblocks because it's a lawless program that Congress has never authorized.'

Recent court orders reaffirmed that states have the authority to run their elections and called into question the credibility of the federal government's data on noncitizens. In an order the night before Election Day, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., found that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security lack statutory authority to distribute lists of purported noncitizens to election officials, and that doing so also violates the Privacy Act. The federal government is expected to appeal.

In an earlier order in October, a different D.C.-based judge vacated the Justice Department's project of requesting unredacted voter rolls from states, comparing that data to federal databases and instructing states to remove suspected noncitizens. The ruling found those actions unlawful and said they disenfranchised eligible voters. The Justice Department has appealed.

The Department of Justice declined to comment on litigation or future plans, but said in a statement: 'The Department will continue to enforce federal election laws and will evaluate matters based on the facts and the law.'

San Luis Obispo District Attorney Dan Dow is investigating the potential noncitizen voters federal officials flagged in his county and has so far charged one individual. He told NPR: 'It has always been a crime but I've never had a noncitizen case referred to me. When we got 63 of them, we said, we will look at them. It is our duty to uphold California law.'

Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, who was a White House adviser on voting rights in the Biden administration, said he expects 'a trickle of actual follow-through on actual cases' of noncitizens voting, adding that this does happen, but it does not happen very often — consistent with what has been known for decades.