DOJ Wants California to Hold Mail Ballots From Voters It Can't Verify as Citizens. Los Angeles Has Not Opened the List.

California has until noon Thursday, October 15, to check a federal list of names against citizenship records and hold the mail ballot of anyone it cannot confirm as a citizen out of the count. Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter set the deadline in letters sent Tuesday to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan. The letters say the department will otherwise seek emergency relief in court.

The letters do not ask California to cancel anyone's registration. McCotter wrote that officials should segregate the ballots, not cancel them, until citizenship is determined. The department's position is that sequestering a ballot differs from changing the voter list. Reuters reported that ballots already returned by listed voters would stay uncounted meanwhile.

What triggers the hold

The trigger is the inability to verify, not a finding of noncitizenship. The letters describe a password-protected thumb drive of people the federal government believes are likely noncitizens, and the instruction reaches anyone on it whose status the state cannot independently confirm in the window. If California complied, a citizen flagged by mistake and slow to check would have a ballot that arrives and is not counted. All registered California voters receive mail ballots, which began going out October 5, and Election Day is November 3.

Tricia Webber, the Santa Cruz County clerk and president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, told the Associated Press she had not seen the letters but called the 48-hour deadline "completely unreasonable." When her office hears of an ineligible person on the rolls, she said, it reviews registration history, checks whether the person has voted, and contacts the voter. That takes "more than 48 hours to even begin to get the full picture," she said.

The 90-day statute and the department's answer

The National Voter Registration Act requires a state to complete, no later than 90 days before a federal election, any program meant to systematically remove ineligible names from its voter lists. The exceptions in 52 U.S.C. 20507(c)(2)(B) cover removals at the registrant's request, for a criminal conviction or mental incapacity under state law, or for death, along with corrections to registration records. Noncitizenship is not among them in the statutory text, and the election is well inside the 90-day window.

Justin Levitt, an NBC News contributor who worked at the Justice Department under President Obama, told NBC the department has no authority supporting its demands. "They can send the letter," he said. "California doesn't have to do anything about it." A department spokesperson answered that only American citizens may vote in federal elections and that the department is asking California to make sure noncitizens are not voting. The request concerns sequestering ballots, the spokesperson added, not altering the voter list.

That distinction is where the legal question sits. None of the coverage reviewed cites a court that has decided whether holding ballots is a removal program under the 90-day rule. None names the statute the department would sue under.

Two officials, one drive

Weber said Wednesday that her office was given no list and that the department lacks the legal authority for its request. Logan said his office had not opened the thumb drive because it would conflict with data security protocols. "We do not consider the device a secure medium," he said, adding that removing a voter must rest on verifiable information, not unconfirmed data matching.

Neither account of the letters gives the number of names on the list or says how it was built. The AP reported that the department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for detailed voter files and lost so far, with California among those that won, in part on state privacy law. Some Republican-led states handed data over, and it was run through a Homeland Security database criticized for flagging citizens. The AP did not say that database produced this list.

The record on earlier federal lists

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote to California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania alleging that as many as 250,000 noncitizens were registered across them. Weber answered that she had "serious doubts about the reliability of your data," because her office had shared its list with no federal agency. The same month, the administration said Nevada had 1,500 noncitizen voters. After the federal government identified them to the state, the AP reported, the number of registered noncitizens was zero.

For scale, the AP counts about 90 people charged by the department with election misconduct this year, 50 of them for allegedly voting as noncitizens. More than 227 million people were registered to vote in 2024. NBC counts more than 100 such cases since the administration took office, over a longer window. Neither number says how many names on this list are real.

If the department files after noon, a judge will be asked to rule with ballots already in the mail and under three weeks left. NBC reported that officials in Georgia, Connecticut, Nevada and Washington have also received federal subpoenas for election records, so a ruling would matter beyond California.