DOJ sues California over alleged non-citizens on voter rolls<\/a><\/p>\n “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,'” McCotter said at Monday’s press briefing. “Instead, L.A. County, in particular, said that they would not even attempt to open the list because of concerns about IT integrity.”<\/p>\n More than 16 million votes were cast in California in the last presidential election.<\/p>\n Officials in California 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.<\/p>\n 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 — which was 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.”<\/p>\n Tim Evans\/AFP via Getty Images – PHOTO: An American flag decorates a privacy booth at a polling station during the first day of early voting for the midterm elections in Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 16, 2026.<\/p>\n “We do not consider the device a secure medium,” L.A. County Clerk Dean Logan said in the statement. “Additionally, the letter does not specify the number of individuals involved or describe the information contained in the records.”<\/p>\n More than 150 million people voted in the last presidential election. President Donald Trump and Republican leaders have characterized the alleged scourge of noncitizen voting<\/a> as a pressing threat to free and fair elections, but experts maintain that cases of non-citizen voting are extraordinarily rare<\/a>.<\/p>\n McCotter said Monday that the Department of Homeland Security arrived at the list of 20,000 names by cross-referencing the publicly available voter rolls in California with “other government databases” and “other public information.”<\/p>\n “The next step subtracted anybody who had any sort of evidence of actually being a citizen. So we looked at State Department records, passport records, Social Security Administration, and alien files. We looked whether someone may have gotten derivative citizenship from a parent, or maybe they were naturalized citizens. All those people [were] knocked off.”<\/p>\n McCotter said they then manually verified the 20,000 names who “are likely not citizens of the United States on California’s voter rolls.”<\/p>\n Regarding the potential prosecution of California election workers who processed voter registrations for those suspected of being non-citizens, 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.”<\/p>\n![\"Tim](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/us.abcnews.go.com\/9edc1f00f9667c52f2371f782726db5e.jpg\"\/)
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