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DOJ wants 20,000 California ballots set aside
The Justice Department says it identified the voters by matching voter rolls against Homeland Security databases. It wants the ballots set aside until the voters' immigration status can be verified.
California is pushing back, accusing the Justice Department of creating confusion just weeks before election day. The state has not formally responded to the lawsuit in court, but it released a statement saying it has procedures in place to protect its elections.
Los Angeles County has said there are potential privacy issues with looking at the list of voters the federal government provided. A federal law bars mass purges of voter rolls within 90 days of an election, and the vote is less than three weeks away.
If the Justice Department succeeds, the lawsuit could cause uncertainty in the California election, and in close races those 20,000 votes could prove significant.
Why does federal law ban voter purges before elections?
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 bars states from running systematic programs to remove ineligible voters within 90 days of a federal election. Lawmakers wrote the window because list-wide removals can sweep up eligible voters by mistake. Someone wrongly removed close to an election may have no time to learn of the error and fix it. The law still allows removals of individual voters at their own request or for specific reasons such as death.
How can matching voter rolls to databases go wrong?
Matching usually relies on names, birth dates, and ID numbers, and common names can produce false matches. Citizenship records can also lag behind reality: a person who became a naturalized citizen after receiving a driver's license may still appear as a non-citizen in older data. In 2019, Texas officials flagged about 95,000 registered voters as possible non-citizens, and the list was withdrawn after counties found that many of those people were citizens. Texas then agreed in a court settlement to a narrower review process.
Why do states, not Washington, run elections?
The Constitution's Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to set the times, places, and manner of congressional elections. Congress can override those rules with federal laws, which is how the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act came about. In practice, the voter rolls, ballots, and counting procedures are handled by state and county officials. The United States has thousands of local election jurisdictions, and each one carries out the work.
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