Trump’s DOJ gives California 48 hours to act on alleged noncitizen voters

14 Oct 2026, 19:04 by Ben Paviour · The Seattle Times

The U.S. Department of Justice threatened legal action Tuesday if California fails to take action on what it claims are thousands of noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls.

In letters sent to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan, acting-U.S. Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter gave the state 48 hours — noon Eastern time on Oct. 15 — to act on a list of potentially ineligible voters stored on a password-protected thumb drive.

McCotter said that if Weber’s office couldn’t verify a voter’s citizenship status, it should instruct local election officials to “segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined.”

“If you cannot implement this process by then, given the ongoing federal election, the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief,” McCotter wrote in the letters, which were first reported by Reuters.

Weber’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in separate news conferences Tuesday, Weber and Attorney General Rob Bonta said they were prepared to defend California’s voting system from what they described as attacks by President Donald Trump’s administration.

“We’ve gone to court many times,” Weber told reporters. “I forgot how many. Was it 28, 29 or 30? I can’t even remember the number this year. And we won every case.”

Courts have blocked the administration’s attempts to force California and other states to hand over voter files and check those records against federal immigration databases.

Federal law restricts systematic voter roll removals within 90 days of a federal election.

Weber and other election officials have defended the accuracy of California voter rolls amid repeated attacks from President Donald Trump and other Republicans. Documented instances of ineligible voters casting ballots is exceedingly rare in California and across the U.S.

In Georgia, for instance, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s 2024 audit found 20 noncitizens who had registered to vote out of 8.2 million registered voters. The majority of the noncitizens had never cast a ballot and most of those cast ballots before the state tightened citizenship checks in 2012.

Responding to emailed questions from The Sacramento Bee, an unnamed spokesperson for the DOJ said the department found thousands of potentially ineligible voters. They did not respond to questions about the methodology used to determine voters’ citizenship status.

“It is a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections and the DOJ is asking California to ensure that is not occurring,” the spokesperson said in an email.