Justice Department sues California over 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters

The Justice Department sued the State of California on Thursday, asking a federal judge to block election officials from counting mail ballots cast by more than 20,000 people the government says are likely noncitizens, in a case filed just three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

The complaint, announced by the Justice Department, names the State of California, Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean C. Logan as defendants. It follows a 48-hour ultimatum that acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent California and county officials two days earlier, demanding they review a list of flagged voters or face "emergency" litigation.

A list, a deadline, a lawsuit

According to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Homeland Security Investigations compared California's publicly available voter files against federal immigration records and identified more than 20,000 registrants it considers likely noncitizens. The department is not seeking to purge those voters from the rolls or cancel ballots already cast; it wants a court order requiring the state to segregate mail ballots from flagged individuals until their citizenship can be verified.

The list itself arrived unconventionally. McCotter's office delivered it to Los Angeles County on a password-protected USB drive, with the password written on a sticky note. Logan's office never opened it, saying the device did not meet the county's data-security standards and that the accompanying letter "does not specify the number of individuals involved or describe the information contained in the records," a position he reiterated after the suit was filed. Weber's office said it never received a list at all.

A pattern of disputed numbers

The lawsuit lands against a backdrop of DOJ voter-roll claims that have frequently not held up once states examined them. In July, the Department of Homeland Security told California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania that it had identified up to roughly 250,000 suspected noncitizens on their combined rolls. When Nevada checked a subset the government flagged, every individual turned out to be a legally registered citizen. The Justice Department has also sued roughly 30 states and the District of Columbia this year demanding they hand over detailed voter-registration data, and courts — including one in California in January — have dismissed nearly all of those suits, finding the department lacked legal authority to compel the records.

This suit is narrower than those earlier ones: rather than demanding California's full voter database, it asks a judge to act on a specific, already-compiled list. But it raises a separate legal problem. The National Voter Registration Act's "quiet period" provision, which the department's own Civil Rights Division has described as barring systematic list-maintenance programs within 90 days of a federal election, is likely to be central to California's defense — the state mailed ballots to all registered voters starting Oct. 5, and the Nov. 3 election is now well inside that window.

• More than 20,000 California voters are named in the DOJ's list of suspected noncitizens.
• The lawsuit was filed Oct. 15, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, case No. 2:26-cv-12025.
• A federal judge dismissed a related DOJ suit seeking California's full voter database on Jan. 15, 2026.
• California ballots for the Nov. 3 midterms began going out to all registered voters on Oct. 5.

Who is caught in the middle

The immediate burden falls on county election offices, which are now weighing whether to act on a federal list they say they have not been allowed to independently examine, in the final weeks of a statewide ballot count. It also falls on the flagged voters themselves — a group election-law specialists warn could include naturalized citizens incorrectly caught up in federal data-matching, given the Nevada case and similar false-positive findings elsewhere this year. Both California's attorney general and voting-rights lawyers have argued that segregating ballots without individualized proof of noncitizenship risks disenfranchising citizens who did nothing wrong.

What officials are saying

Attorney General Todd Blanche cast the case as a fraud-prevention measure, saying in the department's announcement that "state-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America" and that California, if found responsible, "will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system." DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said "even one noncitizen vote cancels out the ballot of an American citizen," and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, who is handling the case for the Central District of California, said state officials "were given an opportunity to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls and to sequester ballots returned from suspected ineligible voters. They refused."

California officials rejected the department's framing entirely. Weber said the state's safeguards against noncitizen voting are already robust and that only U.S. citizens may register under state law.

"Now the U.S. Department of Justice, under threat of 'emergency' litigation, demands that California blindly trust this administration without any evidence or legal authority to justify its request," Weber said.

Justin Levitt, a former senior Justice Department civil rights official who has tracked the administration's voter-data litigation, has said in reporting on the underlying dispute that the federal government lacks legal authority for the demands and that California was not obligated to comply with them before the suit was filed.

What happens next

California has not yet filed a formal response to the complaint. Given the compressed timeline before Nov. 3, both sides are expected to seek expedited rulings; the Justice Department has asked the court to act before Election Day, while California is expected to argue the case should be dismissed on the same quiet-period and authority grounds that doomed the department's earlier voter-data suits. A hearing date had not been set as of Saturday. Advocacy groups, including at least one immigrant-rights organization, have already moved to intervene in the case, arguing that affected voters have their own stake in how the list is used.