Santa Clara County Rejects Trump Administration Voter Probe
Santa Clara County officials on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s demand to set aside hundreds of ballots and vet the voters’ names amid an unprecedented investigation of purported noncitizens on county voter rolls.
The defiant response comes as a legal battle between California and the federal government over the voter rolls escalates just over two weeks before Election Day.
The U.S. Department of Justice had sent letters to all of California’s county registrars this month directing them to provide information verifying the flagged voters’ citizenship and hold off on counting ballots from those voters in the meantime.
A district court judge in Los Angeles will hear the federal government’s request to expedite enforcement of the demand on Tuesday, after a federal appeals court ruled Monday that it was too soon for the higher court to step in.
Echoing the response of local officials facing similar demands across the state, Santa Clara County Executive James Williams said the DOJ had no authority to conscript local election officials in such an effort.
“A letter like that, and one that makes threats to election officials concerning criminal and other legal sanctions, is deeply disturbing and entirely inappropriate,” Williams said in an interview.
The Trump administration is ramping up its pressure on California in what federal officials have called a campaign to root out potential noncitizens registered to vote. Earlier this month, the Justice Department sued California and Los Angeles County elections officials over the list of voters who the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens.”
In a rare Sunday hearing, lawyers for the federal government asked the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to halt ballot counting for 20,000 voters on that list. Election experts questioned the legality of the Trump administration’s move, which came as nearly 3 million Californians have already cast a ballot in the Nov. 3 midterm election.
“What they say they’re trying to do is enforce a federal law that makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law, said on KQED’s Forum. “What I think they’re actually trying to do is to project the image that there’s a widespread voter fraud problem in this country, and to kind of mimic the claims that President Trump has made, that noncitizens are voting in droves and affecting the outcome of elections.”
In letters to the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Sunday, Williams and Santa Clara County Counsel Tony LoPresti argued that state and federal law prohibit the county’s registrar of voters from complying with the federal government’s request.
They argued that the Department of Justice has not presented the county with a warrant for the Social Security numbers and driver’s license information they are seeking. And they cited the National Voter Registration Act, which prevents systematic purges of ineligible voters from registration rolls within 90 days of an election.
Williams also questioned how the federal government produced the list of 902 names that it categorized as “likely aliens” on the county’s voter rolls, echoing doubts cast by California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and others over the data and methodology behind the federal investigation.
“There were three duplicates on the first page alone; the data looks very messy,” Williams said. “A significant number of random names appear not to be voters in Santa Clara County at all.”
The county’s move won praise from Assemblymember Marc Berman, D-Menlo Park, who said the Trump administration’s actions were intended to distract local election officials who are in the midst of administering California’s early voting period.
“Our elections officials need to continue focusing on what they’re doing,” he said. “Our state Department of Justice will defend the system and push back against it in court and be successful.”
The 902 names are a subset of the 20,000-name roster that the U.S. Department of Justice sent to California’s secretary of state this month.
In Sunday’s hearing before the 9th Circuit, attorneys with the DOJ called the probe an effort to prevent noncitizens from violating federal law by casting a ballot — and accused California officials of resisting partnership on the issue.
California, like most states, asks that residents registering to vote attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.
“Attestation is not verification,” Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, wrote Sunday in a post on the social media platform X. “Ensuring only citizens vote isn’t political, it’s enforcing state and federal law.”
But cases of actual voter fraud are incredibly rare. Last week, federal agents charged 28 noncitizen Californians, all of them legal residents, with illegally voting or registering to vote. None has been convicted, but those accused represent just 0.0001% of registered voters in the state.
In its ruling rejecting the Justice Department’s request for an injunction, Judges Mark J. Bennett and Gabriel P. Sanchez concluded that the federal government “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider its application for a Temporary Restraining Order.”
Highlighting that the Trump administration has levied allegations that California’s voter rolls contain noncitizens since the summer, the judges wrote that the government’s “claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one.”
“At least part of the delay here is attributable to the United States’s own delay in filing suit,” they said.