WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 4 in 10 names flagged as possible noncitizen voters in California by the Trump administration cannot be found on the state's voter rolls, according to a legal filing Saturday by an immigrant-rights group.
It's the first outside analysis of a list that the Department of Justice has used to threaten prosecution of election officials. The analysis also found that thousands of U.S. citizens appear to be flagged as ineligible
to vote on the government's list.
The contention was made in a filing by two data analysts at the University of California, Los Angeles. They analyzed the 20,930 names that the department demanded that California election officials treat as possible illegal voters by separating their ballots during the vote count on Election Day.
Multiple judges have rejected the demand as unconstitutional and a threat to democracy, and local and state officials have said the list appears riddled with errors.
The breadth of the problems with the list was outlined in Saturday's filing. It describes an analysis by two members of UCLA's Voting Rights Project, who filed a lawsuit challenging it with the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA.
The research found that 8,880 of the names, representing 42% of the entire list, do not correspond to anyone in California's current voter file. It also found at least 22 are U.S. citizens, and many more may correspond to those of confirmed citizens.
“The expert analysis further makes clear that the mandated voter list endangers a significant number of eligible California voter,” said the filing, which was cosigned by Xavier Becerra, the Democratic candidate for California governor and an adviser to the UCLA Voting Rights Project.
The Trump administration had objected to sharing the list, calling it a “fishing expedition” and noting that it included sensitive information.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump bemoaned the legal rulings against his effort to force California to separate votes from the individuals his administration labels suspected noncitizens, even though one came from a judge he himself nominated.
In a social media post, Trump 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 Trump administration has also urged Washington state to remove what it says were 400 possible noncitizens on its rolls, though state election officials there say that list is also unreliable and includes one voter who cast ballots in the 1990s.
The Justice Department has also warned California election officials they could face criminal liability if they let noncitizens vote and issued subpoenas of election offices there.
Election officials have complained that the Trump administration has confronted them with lists of possible illegal voters at the last minute before Election Day, with no time to conduct the painstaking investigation required by law before removing someone from the rolls.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed to stop the administration from continuing to threaten local election officials.
On Friday, a federal judge in California ordered the Justice Department to stop sending demands to state officials, a decision the Trump administration appealed Saturday. Several counties in the state had run quick checks of the Trump list and found numerous errors.
Saturday's broader analysis was possible because a federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to share the list with the plaintiffs in the case.
CHIRLA and the UCLA project sued the Homeland Security Department in early October to prevent it from using federal immigration data to challenge state voter rolls. The lawsuit cited examples in other states where the federal government’s data has been proven to mistakenly include thousands of citizens.
The case argued that the data-matching methods risk disenfranchising or deterring citizens from voting. On top of that, plaintiffs argued, the lists could disproportionately target naturalized citizens who are legally entitled to vote.
Applying the government’s methodology, the UCLA researchers found that nearly 7,500 naturalized citizens in the state were “highly likely” to be incorrectly flagged as ineligible.
The researchers noted that the administration apparently removed the voter identification number from the names, making it harder for election officials to determine whether the flagged individuals were already on their rolls or were duplicates in the Justice Department list. They described the voter ID number as the most crucial data point.
The Justice Department argues that there is just as much to lose if the ballots aren’t separated.
“Every ballot cast by an ineligible voter cancels out the vote of an American citizen,” Kiersten V. Pels, a spokesperson for the department, wrote in an email. “The Department makes no apology for protecting those votes.”
