Trump Administration Sues California After Demands to Prove Voters’ Citizenship
The Trump administration sued California and state elections officials on Thursday, two days after demanding that they prove U.S. citizenship for tens of thousands of registered voters — or set aside their ballots.
The unusual lawsuit, filed weeks before Election Day, immediately drew criticism from Gov. Gavin Newsom and state officials, who have accused President Donald Trump and the federal government of stoking unfounded concerns about voter fraud and trying to intimidate voters.
In letters sent Tuesday to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters Dean Logan, who are also named as defendants in the lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Justice gave officials two days to confirm the voters’ citizenship status, ramping up its pressure on the state to root out alleged voter fraud ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm election.
The letters sent by acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter were accompanied by a password-protected thumb drive that the DOJ said contained the names of over 20,000 voters who the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens.”
In its complaint filed Thursday, the Justice Department asked a federal court to order California to set aside the vote-by-mail ballots sent to those people and to block the state from counting those ballots until the voters’ citizenship status can be confirmed.
“This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day,” Newsom said in a statement. “Courts have made clear the federal government has no role in running state elections. We will defend free and fair elections in the Golden State and call out every authoritarian attempt to undermine our democracy.”
Legal experts say the lawsuit faces an uphill battle. Similar suits by the Trump administration over California’s voter rolls have been unsuccessful since the start of Trump’s second term.
“We are nineteen days away from the last day of voting. Six million ballots have already been cast. This is not a good faith effort based on the timing,” said David Becker, who heads the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said the 20,000 individuals were flagged as likely noncitizens by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security.
“We provided California an opportunity to self-correct its records, and we requested that it segregate the suspected illegal ballots for the upcoming election,” Blanche said in a statement. “California has refused to comply and intends to facilitate noncitizens in voting, which is a violation of federal law.”
In a statement, Logan said Los Angeles County election officials did not try accessing the thumb drive because it didn’t meet the registrar’s security standards.
After McCotter sent the letters to Weber and Logan, California Attorney General Rob Bonta denounced the Trump administration for taking such a step while voters across the state are already filling out vote-by-mail ballots.
“Every count, recount, hand count, lawsuit, and audit has found that there’s no widespread voter fraud in the U.S.,” Bonta wrote in a post on X, responding to the lawsuit. “The Trump Admin’s last-minute demands are meritless, and we look forward to making our case in court.”
On Thursday, Weber’s office released a response to McCotter’s letter in which the state’s top elections official said she aimed “to set the record straight.”
She noted “serious doubts” about the accuracy of the list as well as an earlier claim from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin that over 190,000 registered California voters “may be” noncitizens. California has yet to receive any response to a request for the data and methodology behind those claims, Weber said, noting that courts have found the federal government’s citizenship records to be unreliable.
“If the federal government possesses proof that certain registered voters in California are ineligible, we will welcome the opportunity to review that evidence and any supporting data or methodology,” Weber wrote in her letter to McCotter. “However, I will not disenfranchise thousands of Californians—or order any county elections official to do so—based solely upon an unsupported and likely inaccurate ‘belie[f]’ that certain voters are ‘likely’ noncitizens.”
The Department of Justice’s demands come after most California counties already began mailing ballots to voters last week.
“California’s voter lists are public, and this administration has had 21 months with total control of the federal government to review those public lists. … One must question why the DOJ would violate its own rules about investigating elections close to Election Day, and over a week after they knew the state had already mailed ballots out, particularly when their past claims have been full of errors,” Becker said.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether any other county elections offices received similar letters from the Trump administration, though several Northern California counties contacted by KQED had not as of Wednesday afternoon.
“Unless we hear otherwise from the California Secretary of State, there will be no changes to Vote-by-Mail procedures in Sonoma County for the Nov. 3, 2026, General Election,” Wendy Hudson, deputy chief registrar of voters for Sonoma County, said in a statement to KQED.
Officials in Marin, Sonoma, Contra Costa, Solano and Yolo counties also said they hadn’t received any communication from the federal government demanding proof of citizenship for the voters on their rolls.
“Registration data is cross-checked at the state level, with other state and federal agencies to ensure that only eligible people are registered,” Hudson said. “If someone does not confirm on a voter registration application that they are a U.S. citizen, we would not process their voter registration application.”
KQED’s Marisa Lagos and Izzy Bloom contributed to this report.