The Justice Department sent threatening letters to California election officials on Friday demanding local registrars immediately sequester ballots from voters the Trump administration alleges are noncitizens.
The letters were hand-delivered to counties across the state in a move that some clerks viewed as an attempt to intimidate state election officials despite ongoing litigation.
In the letter to Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder Kristin Connelly, a copy of which was obtained by MS NOW, U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian warned Connelly that she will face prosecution if she fails to “segregate” ballots from the suspected noncitizens on the department’s list.
“It’s an unenforceable 48-hour deadline delivered late on a Friday,” Connelly told MS NOW. “There’s nothing about this that is actionable for me at this moment, because I need to follow the state and federal laws.”
The move by the Justice Department marks the latest escalation by the administration as President Donald Trump repeats false claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, and data from nonpartisan organizations and state audits have shown that those isolated incidents have not changed the outcome of an election.
The Justice Department sent Connelly a list of 407 suspected noncitizens registered to vote in Contra Costa County. That number is a subset of the 20,000 alleged noncitizens the department sent to California’s secretary of state and Los Angeles County last week.
“I write to make unmistakably clear the legal implications of continuing to send vote-by- mail ballots to those people on the list or tabulating ballots cast by them until citizenship can be verified,” DOJ attorney Missakian wrote to Connelly. The DOJ told Connelly to “temporarily set aside” but “not cancel” the mail ballots until “citizenship status can be determined.”
They gave Connelly and other clerks “48 hours” to work with the DOJ and DHS “to identify who on the accompanying list is a citizen and who is not.” The counties must provide social security numbers, a copy of state IDs, a copy of voter registration applications for people on its list, the DOJ ordered in the letter.
“The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring federal crimes are significant,” the letter to Connelly and other clerks state.
Asked if she’d afraid of prosecution, Connelly said “no.”
“Because I’m not doing anything wrong. I protect our voter rolls, we’re very meticulous about it,” Connelly said. “We follow the law. Do I want a target on my back? No, I do not. Do I want to get prosecuted? No, I do not.”
The Justice Department directly contacted every county in California, DOJ spokesperson, Kiersten Pels, told MS NOW.
“We are asking each county election official to commit to working with us by providing the necessary information for DHS to quickly verify citizenship status,” Pels said. “With their help, we can ensure the most secure election in California history.”
The latest threats to election officials come after the Justice Department sent similar orders to LA County and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber on Oct. 13, after counties had already begun to mail ballots to voters across the state.
In a message to fellow California clerks and election officials Friday, LA County Registrar Dean Logan said the new letter from the DOJ “misrepresents the facts of their own actions” and “threatens local election officials twelve days before the election.”
“To have them threaten me with prosecution at this hour is not what’s helpful for democracy,” Connelly told MS NOW. “I want to make sure that the voters know that we have safe and secure elections.”
The escalation comes after the Justice Department sued California, asking a judge to block the state from counting roughly 20,000 ballots from people the administration claims are “likely noncitizens.” A hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled for next week, but the DOJ is asking an appeals court to make a decision this weekend.
In Los Angeles County, a preliminary sampling of the suspected noncitizen names sent by the Justice Department found that “approximately 43% had canceled voter registrations, and more than 70% had no voting history,” Logan said in a prior statement. And in a court filing, LA County said some 25.8 percent of the sampled voters listed a “place of birth in the United States, a strong indicator of citizenship status.”
Those findings fit a pattern. In Nevada, state officials reviewed suspected noncitizen lists provided by the Trump administration, only to find zero were noncitizens, according to email exchanges between state and federal officials obtained by MS NOW. And in other states, local officials have told MS NOW that the lists of alleged noncitizens are unreliable and risk disenfranchising eligible voters.
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