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Washington — The Justice Department has ordered California to review a list of people who the federal government believes may have received mail-in ballots for the upcoming November election despite not being U.S. citizens, according to a letter reviewed by CBS News.
In the Oct. 13 letter, acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter imposed a 48-hour deadline to review the list of names, which were provided on a password-protected thumb drive, to determine the citizenship status of each individual.
“For individuals whom you cannot independently confirm citizenship status, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” McCotter wrote.
“If individuals on the list have not yet been sent a vote-by-mail ballot, take all immediate and reasonable steps to not provide a ballot to those individuals until we confirm their citizenship status,” he added.
CBS News has reached out to California’s secretary of state for comment.
Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder/county clerk of Los Angeles County, confirmed he had received the letter but said the records were on a USB drive that his office had not yet accessed.
“The letter included a USB drive purportedly containing the referenced records, along with a handwritten note providing a password. We have not accessed the drive because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols,” Logan said in a statement. “We do not consider the device a secure medium. Additionally, the letter does not specify the number of individuals involved or describe the information contained in the records.”
He added: “Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established — and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching.”
Similar letters were also mailed out to other counties in the state, a person with knowledge of the matter said. The move comes after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in July told California’s secretary of state that the government believed there were noncitizens listed on its voter rolls.
Reuters was the first to report on the letter.
McCotter’s demands represent the latest effort by the Trump administration to press blue states on whether they have people who are unlawfully registered to vote on their rolls.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division filed 31 lawsuits in an effort to force states to hand over unredacted copies of their voter rolls. The division has said it wants to ensure states are keeping clean voter lists, but it has since acknowledged that it also intends to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security so that the lists can be screened for noncitizens.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, sent letters to all 50 states in July threatening to take criminal action if they knowingly allowed noncitizens to remain on their voter rolls.
So far, the Justice Department has lost 26 of those cases, and has not achieved one legal victory to date.
It has resorted to using publicly available voter lists and other investigative means to try to identify noncitizens who may be registered in those states.
Since President Trump took office, the department has criminally charged more than 100 people with voter fraud-related crimes.
The crackdown comes as the president has continued to allege, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen due to voter fraud.
Experts have repeatedly found across multiple studies that the incidents of voter fraud are minimal and have not been numerous enough to impact the outcome of an election.
A data analysis published last month by Reuters found that states may have added more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens to voter rolls since 2000 because of software glitches and clerical errors that came about during the processing of driver’s licenses and state IDs.
That figure is small relative to the number of registered voters. In the 2024 election, Census data showed there were about 174 million people registered to vote.
