The Department of Justice sent letters on Friday to local election officials across California demanding they identify potential noncitizen voters. The agency said officials who fail to comply "risk significant federal scrutiny." This move comes as the Trump administration pushes to verify voter rolls before the upcoming November 3 election.
Election officials across the state received letters from the agency saying if they fail to comply, they "risk significant federal scrutiny."
The Department of Justice sent letters on Friday to local election officials across California demanding that they help identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots.
The letter -- sent to every county in the state, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles -- also said local officials would "risk significant federal scrutiny" if they failed to comply to the Justice Department's demands.
Dispatched a week and a half before the midterm elections, the threat arrived as the Trump administration has begun a blitz of initiatives aimed at unearthing evidence of noncitizen voting or stalling election processes in states where it has dubiously claimed that large numbers of noncitizens were registered to vote or were regularly voting.
Last week, the Trump administration sued California, a heavily Democratic state, seeking to temporarily pre-empt the counting of more than 20,000 mail ballots sent to people it said were suspected of registering to vote for the Nov. 3 election, even though they were not U.S. citizens. A federal judge has scheduled a hearing next week on the lawsuit, but the Justice Department on Friday filed papers urging an appeals court to decide the issue this weekend.
California elections rely heavily on mail voting, which President Trump claims is rife with fraud, even though evidence shows only a handful of one-off cases. The Justice Department claims that California's practice of sending a ballot to every registered voter could result in voting by noncitizens who are on the voter rolls even though only American citizens can vote in federal elections.
On Friday, Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said the agency's request to the local officials is a way to "ensure the most secure election in California history."
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