A UCLA analysis of the Justice Department’s flagship list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen California voters found that 42% of the names did not appear on the state’s current voter rolls at all.
The same review confirmed that naturalized citizens had been swept up in the list, and California counties independently reported the data was full of duplicates and birth dates as far-fetched as the year 2044.
Santa Cruz County’s top election official, Tricia Webber, wrote in an email that of 81 people the DOJ had flagged, “more than half are not registered in Santa Cruz County; some names do not match any person currently registered or previously registered.”
Despite those failures, Attorney General Todd Blanche made clear last week that federal scrutiny of state voter rolls is far from finished, telling reporters, “We are actively, and will continue to investigate election integrity cases criminally and civilly.”
The administration had already suffered three consecutive legal defeats before Election Day, with a federal judge, a federal appeals court, and the U.S. Supreme Court all declining to block California from counting ballots of voters whose citizenship had not been independently verified by federal agencies.
Two separate rulings from Washington, D.C.-based federal judges went further, with one finding that the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security have no statutory authority to distribute noncitizen lists to election officials, and a second vacating the entire project of pulling unredacted voter data from states.
Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at Campaign Legal Center, acknowledged the administration would persist but pointed to a mounting legal burden, saying, “They’ve hit substantial roadblocks because it’s a lawless program that Congress has never authorized.”
Even as it dropped its California lawsuit last week, the Justice Department left grand jury subpoenas in place against Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and Sonoma counties, seeking records about how local officials handled federal demands to segregate ballots.
The subpoenas have prompted alarm among county officials, particularly given letters the DOJ sent to every California county in October warning that those who count ballots of people identified as noncitizens “risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”
President Trump amplified those threats on Truth Social, writing, “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”
Santa Clara County Executive James Williams declined to address the subpoenas specifically but said criminal threats against public servants conducting lawful elections “strikes at the heart of what it means to live in a free society.”
Williams was blunt about where he thinks things are headed, telling reporters, “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.”
San Luis Obispo District Attorney Dan Dow is among the local prosecutors moving forward on cases referred by federal officials, having received 63 names and so far charging one individual, saying the referrals gave him his first-ever noncitizen voting case.
Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who advised the Biden White House on voting rights, expects “a trickle of actual follow-through on actual cases,” but adds that outcome would be consistent with longstanding evidence that noncitizen voting, while real, is exceedingly rare.
The administration’s earlier claim that 250,000 noncitizens were registered across four states, including California, was later walked back by federal officials themselves, who conceded the figure represented a “ceiling” rather than a confirmed count.
Data experts had warned from the outset that the administration’s methodology for matching voter rolls against federal immigration databases was likely to generate significant numbers of false positives, particularly for naturalized citizens.
With Democrats having won control of Congress, David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, predicted serious legislative scrutiny ahead, saying, “I think we’re going to have some very serious scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security and their methodology.”
Questions also remain about whether federal officials violated the Privacy Act by using California voter roll data without following legally required public notice procedures, an issue that outlasts the now-dropped lawsuit.
