WASHINGTON — More than four in ten names on the Trump administration's list of alleged noncitizen voters in California cannot be found on the state's voter rolls at all, according to the first outside analysis of the list, filed in federal court on Saturday by the immigrant-rights group Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). The analysis, carried out by two data scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, also found that thousands of U.S. citizens appear to have been flagged as ineligible to vote.
Source: Associated Press
The filing lands one day after federal judges refused the Justice Department's bid to force California to set aside the ballots of the roughly 20,000 voters on the list — the court battle Awaaz Punjab reported on Friday — and three days before the November 3 midterm elections, in which control of Congress is at stake. The department had demanded that California election officials treat all 20,930 named people as possible illegal voters and separate their ballots during the Election Day count.
What the UCLA analysts found
The research was done by two members of UCLA's Voting Rights Project, political scientist Matt Barreto and Michael Rios, and was filed in CHIRLA's lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in federal court in Washington, D.C. It found that 8,880 of the names — 42 percent of the entire list — do not correspond to anyone in California's current voter file. Barreto wrote that he is certain at least 22 entries on CHIRLA's own list of citizen members fully match the government's ineligible list, and the filing counts 66 more CHIRLA members as near-certain matches.
Applying the government's own methodology, the researchers further found that nearly 7,500 naturalized citizens in California were 'highly likely' to be incorrectly flagged as ineligible. The finding fits the state's own review: California told a federal court that about one in four people on the list was born in the United States. The filing, co-signed by Xavier Becerra, the Democratic candidate for California governor and an adviser to the UCLA Voting Rights Project, said the expert analysis 'further makes clear that the mandated voter list endangers a significant number of eligible California voters.'
The analysts also noted that the administration had apparently removed the voter identification number from the names it shared, making it harder for election officials to determine whether flagged individuals were already on their rolls or were duplicates within the Justice Department's own list. They described the voter ID number as the most crucial data point for checking the list.
How the secret list reached outside hands
Saturday's analysis was possible only because Chief Judge James E. Boasberg on Friday ordered the Trump administration to hand the list to CHIRLA's lawyers. The administration had objected to sharing it, calling the request a 'fishing expedition' and noting that the list included sensitive information. CHIRLA and the UCLA project had sued the Homeland Security Department in early October to stop it from using federal immigration data to challenge state voter rolls, arguing that the data-matching methods risk disenfranchising or deterring citizens from voting and could disproportionately target naturalized citizens, who are legally entitled to vote.
The legal pressure has come from several directions at once. Multiple judges have rejected the ballot-separation demand as unconstitutional, and on Friday a federal judge in California ordered the Justice Department to stop sending demands to state officials — a decision the administration appealed on Saturday. Several California counties that ran quick checks of the list found numerous errors, and election officials have complained that the administration confronted them with lists of possible illegal voters at the last minute before Election Day, with no time for the painstaking investigation the law requires before removing someone from the rolls. The department has also warned California officials they could face criminal liability if noncitizens vote, and has issued subpoenas to election offices.
President Donald Trump weighed in on Saturday, bemoaning the rulings against his effort in a social media post. He claimed his Justice Department found '20,000, but potentially Hundreds of Thousands, and maybe even Millions,' of fraudulent votes, 'and the Court has just ruled against it. Why would they reject fixing Election Fraud?' The Justice Department, for its part, argues there is just as much to lose if the ballots are not separated.
"Every ballot cast by an ineligible voter cancels out the vote of an American citizen," department spokesperson Kiersten V. Pels wrote in an email. "The Department makes no apology for protecting those votes." The department has not said publicly how the list was built; reporting on the case says it was drawn from a probe of California's voter records using federal immigration data.
Why this matters for California's immigrant voters
California is home to one of the largest naturalized-citizen populations in the United States, including a large Punjabi-American community in the Central Valley, Sacramento region and the Bay Area — voters who became citizens through exactly the immigration records the federal matching appears to rely on. Voting-rights advocates say that is the core danger of the list: a naturalized citizen whose name is wrongly flagged could have their ballot set aside on Election Day, or be deterred from voting at all by the threat surrounding it. The administration has pressed a parallel demand in Washington state, urging officials to remove about 400 possible noncitizens from its rolls; state officials there say that list is also unreliable and includes one voter who cast ballots in the 1990s.
What happens next
The Justice Department has not yet answered the UCLA analysis in court, and it is still unknown why 8,880 of its names do not appear on the voter file or how many people on the list are in fact citizens. Its appeal of Friday's California order continues, and the underlying CHIRLA lawsuit over the use of immigration data will proceed after the election. For voters, the immediate date is Tuesday, November 3: ballots will be counted under the court orders now in place, which block the separation demand. California voters who want to confirm their registration or track their ballot can use the Secretary of State's 'Where's My Ballot?' service.