Federal Voter-List Push Risks Disenfranchising Californians

The Justice Department demanded that California set aside ballots cast by people it said could be noncitizens, and a federal judge will now have a special master examine the government’s data. The dispute puts the state’s election process and voters’ ballots under pressure from federal claims built on lists whose accuracy officials and experts have questioned.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Anna Baldwin, an attorney for the League of United Latin American Citizens and NAACP, described the data process as “a deeply troubling process, that is trying to use social security numbers that they've glued to the voter file, to go fishing for anyone who has an alien number.” U.S. District Judge David Carter said the special master would examine data provided by the federal government and Los Angeles County. He rejected Bill Essayli’s offer to have Department of Homeland Security officials testify about how they identified people on the list.

Carter told Essayli the government already had a way to address noncitizens who voted: “You've got a remedy for goodness sakes, go out and indict,” the judge said. California faces a December 3 deadline to cure ballots.

A federal demand, a disputed list

On Monday, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals rejected the Justice Department’s California lawsuit on procedural grounds in a 2-1 decision. Trump appointee Mark Bennett and Biden appointee Gabriel Sanchez sided with the state, and both wrote in concurring opinions that they also would have ruled against the department.

Sanchez wrote that California and Los Angeles County “have expressed serious doubts about the accuracy and reliability of the United States' data and methodology used to generate this list and contend that this extraordinary request threatens to disenfranchise thousands of California voters.” At a Sunday emergency hearing, he asked how the administration assembled its list and reached its conclusions. “Your claims very much depend on the reliability of that list,” he told DOJ attorney Matthew Donnelly.

The administration said 20,000 people in California could be noncitizens on the voter rolls. It also alleged this week that 400 possible noncitizen voters in Washington state had voted 1,500 times in past elections. The Justice Department sent letters to both states demanding they set aside ballots cast by people it said could be noncitizens, as early voting in the midterm election was underway. California said the request violated its laws, and the department sued.

How the government built its numbers

USCIS and Homeland Security investigations officials said they obtained California’s public voter list in August 2025 from the secretary of state’s office. The Justice Department redacted who specifically obtained it. Donnelly said the administration “was supplied a list that was purchased” from California. DHS later used a third-party system to compare the file with immigration databases, then said it checked findings against federal databases and manually reviewed voter files.

Nicolas Bartell, associated director of Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at USCIS, said the process produced “a culled list of people who are likely to be noncitizens and who registered to vote in the upcoming 2026 federal election.” Bartell wrote that USCIS “enhances” voter-roll data through Lexis Nexis' Accurint, a commercial data company. Wren Orey of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Elections Project warned that third-party information appeared to “backfill personally identifiable information” and said, “That seems to me like a big risk that they were getting high rates of false positive matches.” Donnelly said he did not know which third parties had been used.

California rejected the Justice Department’s request for its unredacted voter file, which contains sensitive information such as Social Security numbers. The department relied on a publicly available list instead. Christina McCall, an attorney for California, said the government’s explanation did not adequately describe how it compiled the data or obtained the state’s voter rolls. “They're not reliable, they're vague, and they lack personal knowledge,” she said.

The cost of a match

Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan said the DHS file relied on a voter roster more than a year old, an unidentified source, an unnamed commercial platform and federal databases. Logan’s office sampled 200 voters from 7,035 names with Los Angeles County addresses. Aman Bhullar, an assistant registrar/recorder who works on IT and technology, wrote that 42.9% of the sample had canceled registration records, 4.6% were inactive, and more than 71% had never voted. Of those who reported a birthplace, 38.9% indicated they were born in the United States.

Washington state’s secretary of state’s office said one of the 400 records it received from the Justice Department dated to 1994. “The system the DOJ uses frequently flags legitimate U.S. citizens as noncitizens, jeopardizing their legal right to vote,” the office said.

The administration has described the effort as a way to combat voter fraud and support President Donald Trump's claims of mass voter fraud. Its claimed totals have declined under scrutiny: after Trump’s July primetime speech on election fraud, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said more than 190,000 California voters “may be” noncitizens. Donnelly said further DHS checks produced the lower figure of 20,000. A DHS spokesperson said 190,000 remained the number of potential noncitizens DHS asked Secretary (of State Shirley) Weber to review, while the 20,000 were a subset who had completed manual verification so far. “Commonsense step to secure our elections,” the spokesperson called it.

The dispute is not only about a list. It also raises whether the federal government can preempt state election law, while the Constitution primarily gives states power to administer elections. No community response or mutual-aid effort is described in the case. For voters, the immediate stakes are more concrete: federal agencies assemble uncertain matches, states contest them, and ballots face demands for exclusion before California’s deadline.