By admin 
The Trump administration’s list of people it says may be noncitizens who are improperly registered to vote is at the center of numerous fast-moving legal cases that could force changes to California’s management of next week’s midterm elections.
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The list, which the administration has admitted may not be fully accurate, was developed by cross-checking government and commercial databases. It was used to pinpoint 28 California green card holders charged last week with registering or voting as noncitizens, and another 20 individuals nationwide charged over the weekend.
The list is also the basis for a lawsuit the administration has filed against the state, seeking to force California to set aside ballots from some 20,000 people the government says may be noncitizens. The state says the federal government is trying to sow doubt in the integrity of California’s elections with scant evidence, and demanding a response that will upend its management of the midterms, with voting already well underway. The Trump administration insists its aim is to shore up faith in elections by making sure that only citizens vote.
What’s going on here? We put together this guide to explain the legal and political issues at play.
What is the list of possible noncitizen voters?
In July, the federal government sent a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber saying the Department of Homeland Security had conducted a preliminary review of California’s publicly available voter registration rolls. “There may be as many as 190,832 noncitizens registered to vote in California,” the letter read, in part.
More than 80,000 of those people, the letter went on, appeared to have names, dates of birth, address and Social Security numbers matching people listed as noncitizens in a government database. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asked Weber to use the list to identify noncitizens registered to vote and share those names with his department.
Weber responded with a letter of her own on July 23, saying she had serious doubts about the government’s methodology in developing its list. California would not cooperate until Mullin provided specific information about the database it used to identify California voters and specified how it obtained that information. California also requested a detailed accounting of the government’s methodology overall.
Weber says the administration did not respond with those details. But court filings in recent days indicate that officials cross-checked several government and commercial databases to come up with a list it said varied in its likely accuracy, with some names having a low likelihood of being accurate and others with a high or medium likelihood.
On Oct. 13, the U.S. Department of Justice sent follow-up letters to Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters Dean Logan, saying the government now believed as many as 20,000 noncitizens might be registered to vote in California. The letters gave the state and county 48 hours to provide a plan to set aside the ballots of people on the list.
Two days later, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles, seeking an order to require the state and the county to set aside ballots cast by people on the list.
Similar letters were sent last weekend to registrars in other counties, including Sacramento, DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels said in an email to The Sacramento Bee.
“We are asking each county election official to commit to working with us by providing the necessary information for DHS to quickly verify citizenship status,” Pels said. “With their help, we can ensure the most secure election in California history.”
What are the competing political ideas behind the list?
For decades, Republicans including President Donald Trump have expressed concerns that people who are not citizens may be registered illegally to vote. This idea, also fueled by the president’s unproven assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from him, has propelled numerous efforts to require proof of citizenship or identity at the polls or when registering to vote.
But many Democrats, including California’s top officials, see such efforts as reminiscent of Jim Crow-era requirements imposed on Black voters such as reading tests or poll taxes, which courts have held had the practical effect of denying U.S. citizens the right to vote.
Opponents to requiring voters to bring identification to the polls have said that people in marginalized groups or those with disabilities might not have access to their documents. The rise of mail-in balloting has added fuel to both sides of the argument, with supporters of voter ID saying proof of citizenship should be required before a ballot is sent or when someone registers to vote.
In court and in its letters, the Trump administration has said that it is merely trying to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in the crucial upcoming midterm elections.
“When aliens illegally vote in elections, they dilute the votes of citizens and unduly influence who runs the federal government,” the DOJ said in its lawsuit against California. “That also undermines public faith in federal elections.”
But opponents say the Republican administration is trying to cast doubt on California’s voting system and intimidate voters from groups it fears will cast ballots for Democrats.
Fast-moving cases, and criminal charges
Federal law does not require states to formally check a voter’s citizenship, and most do not. In fact, the law limits some of the things that states can do to check citizenship, federal Circuit Judge Mark Bennett said at a hearing on the case.
However, it is illegal to register to vote in a federal election if you are not a U.S. citizen.
In California, adults are automatically registered to vote when conducting business at the Department of Motor Vehicles unless they opt out or declare themselves ineligible. Still, the agency has made mistakes, once registering as many as 1,500 people to vote who were not eligible.
Prosecutions for registering or voting illegally do take place, but they are rare, and generally avoided in the weeks immediately leading up to an election in order to avoid intimidating legitimate voters, experts say.
But last week, as the DOJ’s lawsuit began making its way through the court system, federal prosecutors charged 28 immigrants, all lawful permanent residents of the U.S. living in California, with misdemeanors or felonies related to registering to vote and casting ballots as noncitizens. On Monday, the Justice Department said it had charged an additional 20 people across the country with similar offenses.
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Federal prosecutors said in court documents that the charges prove that the government’s allegations about voter fraud are legitimate.
“Counting any vote from a noncitizen — even just those individuals charged with federal crimes last week — dilutes the influence of honest votes in an election,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said in a pleading before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Sunday.
California Democrats were quick to point out that the number of people charged in California — just 28 — is a fraction of the 20,000 possible noncitizens the administration has flagged on its list. It is an even smaller portion of the roughly 23 million people registered to vote in California, the most populous U.S. state.
And some legal experts say rather than bolster the government’s argument in court, the comparatively small number of charges and arrests may weaken it.
“The charges earlier this week at best show a statistically small problem in millions of votes,” Kevin Johnson, a law professor and former dean at UC Davis, said last week. “Any few errors cannot justify the broad and intrusive injunctive relief sought by the U.S. government, such as setting aside the votes of the 20,000 people on the list.”
Is the list accurate?
The government has admitted its California list may not be entirely accurate. In court filings over the weekend, the Justice Department said that it believed at least half of the 20,000 names were of noncitizens wrongly registered to vote.
Weber and others have pointed to the example of Nevada, where a similar list of about 16,000 potential noncitizen voters was whittled down to fewer than 200 by the Department of Justice. And when state officials investigated those names, it determined that all the people on the list were U.S. citizens, officials in Nevada have said.
Ruling in a separate case, a federal judge in Oakland called the list “flawed.” She ordered the Department of Homeland Security Investigations to stop interviewing or detaining people based on its contents until after the polls close on Nov. 3, saying such actions could sweep in U.S. citizens and amount to voter intimidation.
And in a hearing held Sunday before a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Circuit Judge Gabriel Sanchez questioned both its accuracy and provenance.
“It seems as if the United States is relying on some information that is outside of the federal government through some undisclosed third party,” said Sanchez, an appointee of former President Joe Biden.
What happens next? Will California be required to set aside 20,000 ballots?
The administration’s case against California is moving fast. A federal judge in Los Angeles set a hearing for Tuesday on the government’s request for an injunction against the state. But over the weekend, the Justice Department asked a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to hold its own hearing even before that — on Sunday afternoon.
At the hearing, the judges pressed DOJ lawyer Matthew Donnelly on why the government needed such emergency intervention from the appellate court.
“I don’t see how we have jurisdiction,” said Bennett, a Trump appointee.
Bennett also expressed strong disagreement with the government’s contention that California is not doing enough to enforce federal and state law barring noncitizens from voting. He held up a piece of paper from which he read aloud the wording of the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, giving states the authority to set and regulate their elections.
“The United States executive is unhappy with what they’re doing, and doesn’t like the manner in which they have determined they are going to conduct the election,” Bennett said. “But it seems to me that under the Elections Clause, they have the right to determine the manner of the elections, including sorting out noncitizens.”
Sanchez pressed Donnelly on the reliability of the list and the government’s sources for its information.
Late Monday, the panel dismissed the federal government’s appeal, saying it did not have jurisdiction to intervene. Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented, saying, “The federal government has a sovereign interest in safeguarding federal elections and ensuring that the votes of noncitizens do not undermine our electoral results.”
Meanwhile, the hearing set by U.S. District Judge David Carter is still set to proceed on Tuesday.
There, lawyers for the federal government are expected to argue that California should be required to set aside ballots from people on its list until it can be determined whether they are citizens. Lawyers for the state and its counties are expected to argue that such a requirement would amount to a sweeping change days before an election, and potentially disenfranchise thousands of people.
Investigations into federal voter fraud are legal and do happen from time to time, said Mary-Beth Moylan, an election and constitutional law expert at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law. But asking the state to segregate the ballots and determine the veracity of the government’s list is shifting a job normally done by the federal government on an individualized basis to the states, as well as asking that they investigate tens of thousands of people at once, she said.
Moreover, such actions conducted so close to an election must be based on very specific information about a particular defendant, she said.
“It would be highly unusual for a court at this point in the game, while the election has already commenced, to allow the federal government to shift this burden of proving individual errors and putting that onto the California election officials,” Moylan said.
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This story was originally published October 26, 2026 at 2:42 PM.