“This is not normal protocol for us,” Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber remarked after two individuals bearing Department of Justice credentials arrived at her office to hand-deliver a manila envelope.
The letters sent to 57 of California’s 58 counties follow previous warnings and threats from Trump administration and Justice Department officials regarding noncitizen voters. The correspondence threatens local registrars with criminal prosecution for being “aiders and abettors to a federal crime” if they tabulate ballots cast by individuals whom federal prosecutors have flagged as likely noncitizens.
A Statewide Collision Over Voter Roll Demands
The latest federal push follows previous threats from Justice Department officials and President Trump warning that local California election officials could face criminal prosecution. Previous correspondence was sent to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County elections office. The Department of Justice has also sued the state, alleging there are 20,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls and demanding the state be blocked from tabulating certain ballots the justice department claimed might belong to noncitizens.
🚨BREAKING: The DOJ sued California for sending mail ballots to 20k people the Trump administration claims are likely noncitizens.The lawsuit comes after the DOJ threatened legal action if the state did not set aside cast ballots of those flagged until their citizenship status… pic.twitter.com/MVQmAzOdeF
Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of California, wrote that he was providing Connelly with a “subset” of “407 likely aliens” from the broader statewide list of 20,000 voters, and demanded that Connelly commit within 48 hours to working with Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security officials to identify who among those 407 “is a citizen and who is not.”
Kristin Connelly, head of the Contra Costa County registrar’s office, received a letter from Missakian demanding detailed, nonpublic voter information for 407 individuals within 48 hours.
Escalating Legal Battles and High-Profile Arrests
The standoff over California’s voter rolls is playing out alongside aggressive criminal enforcement actions across the country. Omar Muñoz, a 72-year-old Los Angeles resident, was arrested by officers in police vests; photos show officers walking a shackled Muñoz out in red pyjama pants. Muñoz, who is facing felony voter fraud charges carrying a maximum five-year prison sentence, asserted that the spectacle was staged to create a false impression of rampant voter fraud.
According to Slate, the Justice Department has faced repeated setbacks in its attempts to secure unredacted voter lists nationwide, while studies continue to show that noncitizen voting remains exceedingly rare.
Administrative Pushback and the Road Ahead
L.A. County election chief Dean Logan circulated an internal warning to fellow association members, denouncing the 48-hour deadlines as “unenforceable,” and noting that the Justice Department was “demanding individual level data from the named counties similar to what it has previously only obtained through subpoenas.”
An initial review conducted by Logan’s office of a subset of the 20,000 voters the Justice Department initially flagged found many were born in the U.S., many weren’t actually registered and many had never voted. With the pending federal lawsuit moving through the courts and county clerks grappling with conflicting directives from state and federal authorities, the administration of the midterm elections remains mired in legal uncertainty.
