“That letter arrived 11 days before Election Day with an unworkable 48-hour deadline.”
The line did not come from an activist. It came from Dawn Kruger, spokesperson for the Contra Costa County Elections Department in California, speaking to Reuters. And it sums up, better than any press release, the fight that broke open this weekend, eight days before the November 3 elections.
On Friday, the Justice Department sent letters to several California counties. The ask was blunt: identify alleged noncitizen voters from a larger list of about 20,000 people, set aside their mail-in ballots — segregate them, not cancel them, according to the documents — until citizenship could be verified, and hand over data such as Social Security numbers, state identifications and registration forms. The letters, dated Friday and signed in the Central District by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bilal Essayli, gave 48 hours. Anyone who kept processing those ballots without verifying them, the text warned, would face “significant federal scrutiny and legal consequences.”
Here is the catch: the list is not entirely new, but this round is.
A similar demand had already reached Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County on October 13, with a password-protected thumb drive. On October 15 the Department sued the state to keep those ballots from being counted until citizenship was verified. And on October 19 it announced charges against 28 lawful permanent residents who, prosecutors say, appear on the list. Those charges are allegations against specific people, not a verdict on the thousands of other names. That distinction matters, a lot.
The county-by-county numbers in this new round show the scale. Orange County got 1,754 names. Riverside, 1,355. San Bernardino, 1,133. Contra Costa, 407. Ventura, 334. Santa Barbara, 180. San Luis Obispo, 63. And Napa, just 42 names out of about 86,000 registered voters — its registrar, John Tuteur, told the Associated Press that two uniformed Department of Homeland Security agents delivered the letter to his office on Friday afternoon. “We are not going to change anything about what we do. We move forward with the election,” he said.
So what did the counties that started checking actually find?
Los Angeles reviewed a sample of 200 records. More than 40% had canceled or inactive registrations. More than 70% had no voting history. And nearly four in ten appeared to have been born in the United States, which Deputy Registrar-Recorder Monica Flores described in a court filing as “strong evidence of citizenship.”
That is not a full audit. No serious person would say those 200 names prove the whole list is wrong. But it is not a minor detail either, when the request is to set ballots aside days before an election.
In Mendocino County, something even more basic happened: Registrar Katrina Bartolomie said the list she received contained names of voters who did not even belong to her jurisdiction. “Those are not our voters on there. They are from another county,” she said. California’s attorney general, in a court filing, flagged similar errors: people who did not live in the counties the lists were sent to.
On Sunday, the case reached the Ninth Circuit in a rare weekend session. The administration had appealed there because it considered District Judge David O. Carter too slow: his hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, October 27, at 1 p.m. Pacific time.
The judges did not rule on Sunday. But they asked hard questions.
Judge Mark Bennett, appointed by Trump, questioned whether the appeals court even had jurisdiction to step in before the lower court ruled. He also pointed to the Constitution’s Elections Clause: state legislatures set the time, place and manner of congressional elections. The federal executive branch may disagree with the manner, he said according to AP, but that prerogative belongs to the state.
Judge Gabriel Sanchez, meanwhile, asked about the Tenth Amendment and the “third-party analytics” used to build the list. How, he asked, did the figure go from about 190,000 names mentioned in a July letter to 20,000 now? Justice Department attorney Matthew Donnelly answered that the drop came from the Department of Homeland Security’s vetting process.
On the other side, Donnelly argued California causes “irreparable harm” by allowing noncitizens to vote and that the harm is “irreversible and irrevocable.” Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels rejected the idea of a purge: she said the Department is not seeking to cancel registrations or take any programmatic action, but to “ensure the safest election in California history.”
California answered in a different tone. Weber had already called the October demand an unprecedented measure threatening the voting rights of thousands of residents on unverifiable information. Her attorney before the Ninth Circuit, Sam Siegel, was shorter: “It has no basis in law or fact.” Attorney General Rob Bonta accused the Department on Saturday of politicizing the law. And Los Angeles County attorney Seth Waxman put the problem in work hours: if staff spent just three minutes checking each of the expected 2.75 million mail ballots against the list, the process would take 140,000 hours, about 16 years of work.
So what changes today for someone voting in California?
For now, nothing at the counter. There is no Ninth Circuit ruling, the counties that responded say they will keep running the election under current law, and the Tuesday, October 27 hearing is the next date that could move things. That does not mean the issue is closed: it means that, this Monday, mail voting in California is proceeding normally.
And there are three things worth doing, without panic and without forwarding chain messages:
First, if you are a citizen voting in California, check your status in the Secretary of State’s official My Voter Status tool, at voterstatus.sos.ca.gov. There you can also see whether your mail ballot was received and counted. Every active registered voter automatically receives a mail ballot for the November 3 election; ballots returned by mail must be postmarked by November 3, and ballots returned to a secure drop box must be deposited by 8 p.m. that day.
Second, if you are not a citizen — including lawful permanent residents — do not register or vote in federal elections: federal law prohibits it, and last week’s charges show prosecutors are acting on that front. If you were ever registered by mistake at the DMV or in another transaction, sort it out with your county elections office before voting, not on Election Day.
Third, if you need help in Spanish, California’s voter hotline in Spanish is (800) 232-VOTA (8682).
The core of the fight — who can vote, and who decides how votes are counted — will not be settled by a headline. It may be settled, or not, at Tuesday’s hearing, with a list that counties have already started testing name by name. And that test, so far, is not going well for the list.
Official sources
- https://www.infobae.com/estados-unidos/2026/10/26/el-departamento-de-justicia-de-eeuu-solicito-que-los-condados-de-california-identifiquen-a-los-presuntos-votantes-no-ciudadanos/
- https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/25/politics/california-midterm-voting-judges?cid=external-feeds_iluminar_meta
- https://www.reuters.com/world/us-justice-department-threatens-california-over-alleged-noncitizen-voters-letter-2026-10-14/
- https://caearlyvoting.sos.ca.gov/
- https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov/
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