With three weeks to go before the midterms, Trump’s DOJ threatened legal action against California’s secretary of state and Los Angeles County’s top election official unless they reviewed a list of supposed noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. The list came on a password-protected thumb drive, and DOJ wanted the mail-in ballots of anyone on that list set aside and left uncounted until their citizenship could be verified. DOJ even supplied a deadline: 48 hours.
The deadline passed with the drive unopened. The county registrar never plugged it in—because he did not consider it secure. So on Oct. 15, DOJ sued California in federal court, asking a judge to order the state to set aside the ballots of more than 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters. It is far from clear DOJ has any authority to make these demands.
NBC News explains:
Justin Levitt, an NBC News contributor who was a Justice Department official during the Obama administration, said the federal government has no authority supporting its demands. “They can send the letter,” he said. “California doesn’t have to do anything about it.” Federal law prohibits systemic list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election. At this point, less than three weeks out from Election Day, the only changes to the voter rolls can come from individualized information, like notification from the Social Security Administration that someone has died. A DOJ spokesperson said the department is asking California to sequester ballots, not change their voter list. ...
Some officials said they fear these actions were designed to set up possible legal challenges after the midterm elections. ... “Are they laying the groundwork to say that voting was fraudulent? Of course they are, 100% they are,” [Levitt] said, referring to the Trump administration. “Is the boy who cried wolf going to cry wolf? Yes, that’s what the boy who cried wolf does.”
This reeks of desperation. Republicans appear to be in deep trouble nationwide heading into the midterms. But California is an odd place to go looking for a stolen election: Trump lost the state by 20 points in 2024, a margin no noncitizen voting ring could manufacture without becoming the most formidable turnout operation in American history. Still, Trump will hold up California’s refusal as one more bit of pretext to cast doubt on the integrity of other elections and to fearmonger about supposed threats to the country.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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