Trump administration sues California over noncitizens on voter rolls

Lawsuit comes weeks before midterm elections and follows debunked claims of noncitizens voting in various states. Save Share The administration of United States President Donald Trump has sued the state of California after the state missed a deadline to review a list of registered noncitizen voters sent to officials. In the lawsuit, filed on Thursday in a US District Court in California, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials asked the court to prevent the state from counting mail-in ballots from voters on a list shared with the state that it said contained 20,000 noncitizens. The agency said it had attempted to “work collaboratively” with California to identify noncitizens registered to vote in the state, but “California made no serious effort to do so”. The move follows a 48-hour deadline the DOJ gave California in letters sent to officials in several counties in the state on Tuesday, threatening further action if they did not review lists of allegedly ineligible voters the agency said it had shared. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the top state official tasked with administering elections, responded to the letters, saying in a three-page letter that she wanted to “set the record straight” on events that transpired since July. The senior California official maintains that the administration is demanding “unprecedented measures that threaten thousands of Californians’ right to vote, based on unverifiable information or methodology that you still fail to explain or provide”. Weber said she was informed that the lists provided to local officials include the names of roughly 20,000 individuals. Weber said no list was ever sent to her office. The department previously said it suspected “thousands” of registered voters of being noncitizens, and a lawsuit filed earlier Thursday by the Justice Department put the number at “tens of thousands”. “Despite failing to send the list of alleged non-citizens to my office, you demand that we request transmittal of the list, review and confirm the citizenship status of each of the approximately 20,000 individuals on the list on the eve of an election and within a mere 48 hours,” she wrote. “This is an emergency of the DOJ’s creation.” In a statement on Wednesday, election officials in Los Angeles County, one of the county offices that received the ultimatum from the DOJ, pointed out the threat was issued just 21 days before midterm elections....