By Andrew Goudsward and Luc Cohen
WASHINGTON, Oct 15 (Reuters) – The US Justice Department sued California on Thursday, asking a federal judge to block the state from counting mail ballots for the November 3 midterm elections from more than 20,000 voters the Trump administration alleges are likely noncitizens.
The lawsuit marks the latest effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to boost the federal government’s role in elections ahead of the midterms, with his Republican Party locked in a tight battle to retain control of both houses of Congress.
The US Constitution assigns the responsibility of administering elections to individual states, though the federal government has some oversight role.
The lawsuit comes after Reuters reported that the department gave California a 48-hour deadline on Tuesday to review a list of alleged noncitizen voters, to whom the department said California had sent mail-in ballots. The list was provided on a thumb drive.
Letters addressed to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan demanded that the state and county segregate returned mail-in ballots from voters on the Justice Department’s list and not tabulate their votes “until citizenship has been determined.”
In cases where ballots have not been sent out yet, the Justice Department demanded in the letters that California officials withhold them from those on the list until their citizenship is confirmed.
The lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Central District of California, seeks a court order preventing California from “tabulating in federal elections vote-by-mail ballots received” from voters on the list, which the DOJ said included more than 20,000 voters, until their immigration status is verified.
Neither Weber’s nor Logan’s offices immediately responded to requests for comment.
Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on election law, said the DOJ’s request would potentially cause California to violate a federal law barring states from conducting mass purges of voter rolls within 90 days of an election.
The Trump administration has argued in another case that such restrictions should not apply to removal of noncitizens because they were not legally authorized to register in the first place.
Hasen said the DOJ lawsuit would likely face legal hurdles.
“The federal government doesn’t have any business directly telling states what ballots they can or cannot send out or not count,” he said. “I just don’t see the federal authority to do that over a state.”
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward in Washington and Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Matthew Lewis)
