The Justice Department gives all 58 California counties 48 hours to help identify suspected noncitizen voters, warning of federal scrutiny if they refuse

The ballot fight in California moved from the courts to the counties this weekend. The Justice Department has warned election officials across California that they could be targets of federal scrutiny if they refuse to help identify suspected noncitizens on the voter rolls and set aside their mail ballots while citizenship checks run, the New York Times reported, in a story carried by Reuters on Saturday.

The letters went to all 58 California counties on Friday. Local officials were given 48 hours to help determine the citizenship status of the individuals on the federal lists sent with the letters. Those lists name people the department believes are illegally registered to vote, and the department described them as a subset of the 20,000 people across California it identified last week as possible noncitizens who may have received ballots.

The request itself is narrow on its face. For people whose citizenship status cannot be confirmed, the letters ask counties to instruct election officials to segregate, not cancel, those individuals vote by mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined. The warning behind the request is not narrow. Counties that fail to comply could face significant federal scrutiny, the letters said.

The letters land inside a court case that is already moving on a weekend clock. On October 15 the department sued over the ballots, and on October 16 it warned Los Angeles County and California election officials they could be liable as abettors of a federal crime if they count mail ballots returned by the more than 20,000 people the administration says are probably noncitizens. Late on Friday the Ninth Circuit ordered California to respond by noon Saturday to the department emergency request to set the disputed ballots aside. No ruling from the appeals court had been reported by Saturday evening, and a hearing before District Judge David Carter remains scheduled for next week.

California officials have rejected the federal moves. They say the federal government has not provided sufficient information about how it identified the alleged noncitizens. Secretary of State Shirley Weber has accused the administration of attempting to unlawfully access protected voter data and purge voter rolls, and she says the efforts undermine confidence in elections. The Justice Department and the California attorney general office did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment on the letters.

The California letters are one front of a wider push. The department has ramped up prosecutions of people accused of voting illegally while not holding American citizenship ahead of the November 3 midterms, and the White House has pushed federal agencies to accelerate their review of at least 47 state voter rolls obtained by the Department of Homeland Security, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.