Trump Threatens California Officials With Jail Over Mail Ballots
The president says state officials could face prison in a dispute over how California handles voting by mail.
The U.S. Justice Department warned Los Angeles County and California election officials on Friday that they could be held liable as accomplices to a federal crime if they count mail ballots returned by more than 20,000 people the Trump administration says are probably noncitizens.
The warning, addressed to Los Angeles County Assistant Counsel Peter Bollinger, came less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections and days after the department gave California 48 hours to review a list of alleged noncitizen voters or face legal action. On Thursday, the department sued the state in federal court to block it from counting the ballots.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter wrote in a letter released Friday that voting by a noncitizen in a federal election is a federal crime, and that knowingly helping it happen is equally unlawful. He urged the county and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber to reconsider their refusal to take steps the administration says are needed to deter voter fraud.
President Donald Trump shared the letter on Truth Social and said the officials would all go to jail for a long time. Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan were copied on the letter. The county counsel’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Weber’s office pointed to an earlier statement in which she said federal attempts to obtain protected voter data and remove names from the rolls sow chaos and erode public trust in elections.
California sends a mail ballot to every registered voter. In letters sent on Tuesday, the Justice Department asked state and county officials to set aside the returned ballots of voters named on its list, and of anyone whose citizenship cannot be independently verified, and not to count them until citizenship is determined. The department also asked officials to withhold ballots from listed voters who have not yet received one until their citizenship is confirmed.
Los Angeles County Counsel Dawyn Harrison said on Thursday the county cannot comply because the administration did not explain how the list was compiled. Friday’s letter said the department relied on internal immigration records and data matching, and the lawsuit says the Department of Homeland Security compared voter rolls with its own databases. The president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials called the 48-hour deadline completely unreasonable.
Weber said in a letter to the Justice Department that her office had not shared the statewide voter list with Homeland Security or any other federal agency and that she doubted the reliability of the data. She noted that the federal government had earlier alleged nearly 16,000 possible noncitizens on Nevada’s rolls, and that Nevada determined all of them were U.S. citizens. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said state officials would not carry out the federal requests to withhold ballots.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, asks a judge to bar the state from tabulating mail ballots from the listed voters until their status is verified. The department said California made no serious effort to work collaboratively with it. Mail ballots are widely used in California and other western states.
In July, Trump said his administration had found evidence of more than 275,000 noncitizens registered to vote, although it was unclear how many had actually voted. In some past cases, systems meant to verify citizenship wrongly flagged naturalized citizens as noncitizens. Studies find that noncitizens casting ballots is exceedingly rare.
The Justice Department stepped up prosecutions of alleged noncitizen voting in July, and it has charged about 90 people with various election offenses this year, including 50 accused of voting as noncitizens. It has also sued 30 states and the District of Columbia over access to voter data, and it has lost those cases so far. The White House pushed federal agencies to speed their review of at least 47 state voter rolls obtained by the Department of Homeland Security. In September, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an administration effort to restrict mail-in ballots for the Nov. 3 elections.
