The Noncitizen Voter Lists Hang Over Tuesday: What Reuters Found in the Fight to Block 20,000 California Ballots
The Justice Department told five states it had found likely noncitizens on their rolls and sued to stop California counting 20,000 listed voters' ballots. Two courts refused, days before the vote — and the lists themselves may matter most after it.
Two days before the midterm elections, a fight over lists has become one of the ways Tuesday's results could be contested after the fact, Reuters reported on November 1. The Trump administration has acknowledged sending letters to election officials in five states — California, Washington, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada — saying it had identified noncitizens on their voter rolls, according to a Justice Department document seen by Reuters. In California, an October 13 letter demanded the state not count ballots from about 20,000 registered voters 'who federal agencies reasonably believe are likely noncitizens' without first verifying their citizenship, and warned that election workers who processed those ballots could face prosecution. The department is now suing California to block it from counting any ballots from the list. Noncitizen voting is illegal and can lead to jail time, fines and deportation.
The courts, so far, have said no. On October 28 a federal judge in California rejected the department's bid to block the ballots, saying the move would 'wreak havoc' on the November 3 elections and questioning the reliability of the list; a federal appeals court upheld that ruling on October 30, citing a 'material risk' of disenfranchising eligible voters. Reuters reported the department would 'probably' appeal to the Supreme Court, and that it has appealed many of its losses in the related cases. The scale behind the dispute is part of the record too: the Department of Homeland Security has obtained at least partial voter-roll data from at least 47 states, and a Reuters investigation in July found just 129 cases in which noncitizens were federally charged with voting illegally since Congress created the federal 'voting by aliens' statute in 1996 — many appearing to stem from confusion or administrative errors rather than intentional fraud.
Texas is not one of the five states the report names as receiving a letter, and nothing in it places a Texas list in election officials' hands. The reason the story belongs in a Dallas–Fort Worth file is the mechanism Reuters describes: lists like these could provide a basis for challenging close election results even if the administration struggles to prevail in court. Texas is about to produce exactly the kind of result that gets challenged — a Senate race polling inside the margin of error, decided by voters in counties including Dallas and Tarrant. What is being litigated in California this weekend is, in that sense, a preview of the arguments available anywhere a race finishes close on Tuesday night.
