Los Angeles election officials tell a court they have no way to verify voter citizenship beyond a voter's word

The admission sits in a court filing, and the federal prosecutor in Los Angeles made sure everyone saw it.

"Los Angeles election officials just told a federal court they have no independent way to verify citizenship beyond what voters attest. (They simply take their word for it.)," Bill Essayli, the First Assistant US Attorney for the Central District of California, wrote on X on Tuesday, posting highlighted text from the Justice Department's lawsuit against California. "Under federal law, only citizens may vote in federal elections. Yet California has not acted on the list of 20,000 suspected noncitizens or agreed to set aside their ballots. American citizens' votes are being diluted in California." Essayli said investigators obtained a commercial copy of California's voter rolls and matched it against federal immigration databases to build the list, after the state refused for a year and a half to hand the rolls over.

The charges came first. On Monday the Justice Department announced election crime charges against 28 noncitizens in California. Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general, said each of the 28 appears on the list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants the department gave California officials the week before, that at least 22 of them allegedly cast ballots in US elections, and that at least eight allegedly voted more than once, some of them in the 2026 primary. "This Department of Justice will not look the other way while noncitizens vote in federal elections," McCotter said. The department filed an emergency motion the same day asking the court to order California to set aside mail ballots from the more than 20,000 suspected noncitizens until their citizenship can be verified. "We asked California to work collaboratively in that process. We never heard anything back," McCotter said. In a television interview on Tuesday, Essayli went further and warned that California officials who knowingly count ballots cast by noncitizens could themselves face prosecution.

California's answer, filed in court on Tuesday, is that the federal list does not hold up. The Secretary of State's office called the litigation "a reckless political stunt" at best and, at worst, a threat to disenfranchise thousands of Californians in this election, and said the department's legal theory borders on the absurd. Los Angeles County's attorneys said about 7,000 of the people on the list have addresses in the county, and that in a random sample of 200 of them, nearly 40 percent indicated they were born in the United States. A spokesperson for Attorney General Rob Bonta said allegations of voter fraud should be taken seriously and investigated, but that the 28 people charged are about 0.0001 percent of California's more than 23 million registered voters. State officials say California law already bars noncitizens from voting and that there is no evidence such voting is widespread.

On Tuesday the fight opened on a second front. Three national Democratic organizations, the Nevada Democratic Party, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and a California voter who is a naturalized citizen sued the administration in federal court in Washington, asking a judge to block the president and his officials from threatening state and local election officials with criminal prosecution and from pressuring states to remove voters from the rolls. Their filing calls the threats a pattern of intimidation meant to frighten officials into compliance, and notes that the president has called for voting to be nationalized. The California case was assigned on Monday to US District Judge John Holcomb in Santa Ana. No hearing has been scheduled, and the November 3 election is thirteen days away, as of October 21.

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