Hannah Wiley, Sophia Bollag, Raheem Hosseini, San Francisco Chronicle
President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice ramped up threats to directly interfere with California’s midterm election on Tuesday with two letters it sent to state officials demanding they review a list of alleged noncitizen voters and take steps to prevent them from casting ballots or face repercussions.
The letters were sent by Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, Los Angeles County’s registrar-recorder and county clerk, claiming the federal government has identified a list of noncitizen voters who were sent vote-by-mail ballots to illegally participate in the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
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Assembly Member Gail Pellerin, a Santa Cruz Democrat who chairs the Assembly’s elections committee and authored one of the new laws designed to protect against election interference, said she expects California to successfully resist the DOJ’s demands.
“Public reporting has exposed serious flaws in the Trump administration’s noncitizen voting claims, including disputed figures and unreliable data matching that has wrongly flagged eligible voters,” she wrote in a statement. “California will not sacrifice lawful voters’ rights to accommodate an unreliable list and an artificial deadline. Given the repeated court losses in its bid to usurp states’ authority over elections, the Justice Department’s power grab won’t fool Californians.”
