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Justice Department orders California to check citizenship of an undisclosed list of mail voters and hold their ballots by noon Thursday, Oct. 15

Political Guyentist · October 15, 20262 min read

PBS NEWSHOUR

The letters do not say how many people are on the list or how DOJ picked them. Los Angeles County has not opened the thumb drive.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent letters Tuesday, Oct. 13, to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan. Each came with a password-protected thumb drive. It lists people DOJ calls likely noncitizens who were sent mail ballots.

The demand. Check each person's citizenship. "Segregate — not cancel" returned ballots that can't be verified. Hold back ballots not yet mailed. California began mailing ballots to every registered voter on Oct. 5.

The pushback. Logan says his office does "not consider the device a secure medium." Removing a voter, he says, "must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching." California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, called the fraud claims "a lie" and "a conspiracy theory."

What next. If the state cannot comply by the deadline, McCotter wrote, "the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief" in court.

What DOJ's voter-roll suits and fraud charges have producedDOJ's Civil Rights Division has sued states 31 times over voter rolls and has lost 26 of those suits2 details
  • DOJ's Civil Rights Division has sued states 31 times over voter rolls and has lost 26 of those suits
  • DOJ has charged about 90 people with election crimes this year, and 50 of them are accused of voting as noncitizens

What we’re less sure of2 of 8 claims

Red take

California should set aside the ballots the Justice Department flagged, because a held ballot can still count once its voter checks out, while one mixed into the count can never be pulled back. Trent McCotter, the department's acting deputy attorney general, asked only to "segregate — not cancel," and the department has charged 50 people this year accused of voting as noncitizens. Refuse that pause, and any ineligible ballot on that list is counted for good.

Blue take

A thumb drive Los Angeles County has not even opened is no basis for holding back a citizen's ballot. The Justice Department's letters do not say how many people are listed or how they were picked, and its Civil Rights Division has lost 26 of its 31 voter-roll suits this cycle. Hold ballots by Thursday noon on that, and citizens lose time to vote over a match nobody has shown.