President Trump escalated his administration’s feud with California on Friday, threatening election officials with imprisonment over an ongoing dispute about noncitizen voters.
Trump declared on Truth Social that California officials “will all go to jail for a long period of time” if they refuse to cooperate with the Department of Justice.
The post shared a letter sent by the DOJ to Los Angeles County officials warning that counting ballots from alleged noncitizens could expose workers to federal criminal prosecution.
The Justice Department sued California Thursday after delivering a USB drive containing roughly 20,000 names it says may belong to noncitizen voters who received mail-in ballots.
Officials were given just 48 hours to cross-reference those names with data provided by the Department of Homeland Security, a timeline California’s top election official quickly rejected.
Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter urged Los Angeles County and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber to reconsider their refusal to act on the administration’s demands.
“If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime,” McCotter said in the letter.
The Justice Department also urged officials to temporarily segregate ballots connected to flagged registrations while the federal government works to verify citizenship status.
According to a copy of the letter shared by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, the correspondence included a thumb drive and a handwritten password to access the files.
Weber pushed back forcefully, calling the DOJ’s demands “vague” and arguing that compliance would violate the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits systematic voter-roll removals within 90 days of a federal election.
“As you fully acknowledge, ballots have already been delivered to voters and voting is well underway,” Weber wrote in her letter responding to the Justice Department.
Weber further charged that “the USDOJ’s relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections.”
The timing of the demand frustrated election officials across California, with the midterm elections just three weeks away and absentee ballots already distributed to voters.
The UCLA Voting Rights Project, which sued DHS and DOJ in September seeking information about how the noncitizen voter list was developed, moved quickly to seek an emergency court order blocking the administration’s push.
The outside group notified the DOJ that it would pursue a temporary restraining order if the administration did not abandon its plans to compel California to cross-reference its voter rolls.
This is not the first time the administration has threatened criminal consequences for election workers, with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin previously warning officials that they “can be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even depending on how far it goes, prison time.”
The DOJ has repeatedly attempted to obtain voter rolls from California and other states, losing every single case it has brought before the courts.
Legal experts say the latest lawsuit is unlikely to succeed, continuing a pattern of judicial defeats for the administration on this issue.
