Qatar's Al Jazeera reported on October 15th that the government of US President Donald Trump has sued California on the grounds that California failed to review a list of 'registered non-citizen voters' that was sent to officials on time.
In a lawsuit filed on the 15th with a federal district court in California, officials from the U.S. Department of Justice asked the court to prevent the state from counting “votes sent by registered voters listed on a particular list”. The Department of Justice stated that the list contained 20,000 non-citizens. The department said it had tried to “work with” California to identify non-citizens who are registered to vote in that state, but “California has not made serious efforts to do so”.
Prior to this, the Ministry of Justice sent letters to officials in several counties within the state on the 13th day. The letter gave California a 48-hour deadline and threatened to take further action if they failed to review the list of unqualified voters provided by the agency.
California’s highest elected official in charge of elections, Secretary of State Sheila Wu, responded to these letters. In a three-page letter, she expressed her desire to “clarify the facts” regarding the events that have taken place since July. This senior California official insisted that the Trump administration is demanding unprecedented measures, based on unverifiable information, which threatens the voting rights of thousands of California residents.
Weber said that she was informed that the list provided to local officials contained the names of about 20,000 people, but no such list was ever sent to her office. The Department of Justice previously stated that it suspected that “thousands” of registered voters were non-citizens. Earlier on the 15th, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit stating that this number was “tens of thousands”.
She wrote: “Although you failed to send the list of individuals who are reportedly non-citizens to my office, you demanded that we request the list’s transmission just 48 hours before the election, and that we review and confirm the citizenship of approximately 20,000 people on the list. This is a situation of emergency created by the Department of Justice itself.”
On the 14th, Los Angeles County election officials stated in a statement that they received a letter, a USB drive, and a handwritten note that appeared to contain a password. However, they would not attempt to access the USB drive, as “we do not consider this device to be a secure medium.”
The county office stated that maintaining an accurate voter list is "the basic responsibility of our office." State laws clearly stipulate that removing individuals from the list must be "based on verifiable information."
Trump has repeatedly stated that a large number of non-citizens, who are not legally eligible to vote in federal elections, are voting in states led by Democrats. Officials in states such as California have said that the number of such voters is insignificant, and that the scale of the issue does not warrant intervention in the weeks leading up to the election on November 3rd.
California Governor Gavin Newsom severely condemned the litigation brought by the Department of Justice against his state, calling it a “fatal and desperate attempt” by Trump to “suppress California voters just three weeks before the election day.”
Nuson said in his statement: “The court has made it clear that the federal government has no authority to manage state elections. We will defend the free and fair elections in California, and expose any attempts to undermine our democracy.”
Al Jazeera stated that Trump has long falsely claimed that a non-referendum caused his defeat in the 2020 elections, and attributed this to Democrats.
