WASHINGTON — The U.S. Justice Department has given California officials 48 hours to review a federal list of people it alleges may be noncitizens who received mail ballots, escalating a dispute over voter eligibility less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
The demand was contained in a letter sent Tuesday, Oct. 13, by acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, according to Reuters, which reviewed the document. The department said Los Angeles County officials received a password-protected drive containing names of people the federal government believes are likely noncitizens and were sent mail-in ballots.
The allegation has not been independently verified. Reuters reported that the letter did not publicly establish how the government identified the people or whether any of them had actually voted.
According to the report, the Justice Department instructed California to stop ballots from being sent to people on the list until their citizenship is confirmed. For ballots already mailed back, the department asked officials to separate them and withhold them from counting until eligibility is determined. The letter warned that the federal government could seek emergency court action if the state does not comply.
A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed the letter and said the department would take legal action it considers necessary to enforce federal election law. Weber’s office had not responded publicly to the new demand when Reuters published its report early Wednesday.
The confrontation follows months of federal efforts to obtain state voter files and compare them with immigration records. On Oct. 9, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that the Justice Department’s broader voter-roll screening policy was unlawful. She found that the government had minimized the risk of mistakenly flagging eligible citizens, including naturalized Americans whose updated citizenship may not appear in older federal records.
Reuters reported that the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., over access to voter data and had lost 26 of those cases as of Oct. 9. Federal law also restricts systematic voter-roll removals within 90 days of a federal election.
California says only U.S. citizens may register to vote in state and federal elections. In a Sept. 25 statement, Weber said California would not use the federal SAVE immigration database for the 2026 general election and that the state’s election procedures remained unchanged.
The dispute could affect ballots in the nation’s most populous state at a moment when control of Congress is closely contested. Any federal court filing prompted by the 48-hour deadline would likely force judges to weigh election integrity claims against federal limits on last-minute voter-list changes and the risk of disenfranchising lawful voters.
