“I will not disenfranchise thousands of Californians based solely upon an unsupported and likely inaccurate ‘belief.'”
Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote that to the Justice Department last week. On Monday the department answered with handcuffs. Federal agents arrested 11 green-card holders across California and announced criminal complaints against 28 for registering or voting as noncitizens, two weeks before Election Day, under a banner it calls Operation Protect the Vote. Every outlet has the 28 and the 11. What none of them has done is put those numbers next to the ones the same government used to justify the operation, so we did.
The Funnel, With the Arithmetic Shown
In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote to four secretaries of state claiming that as many as 190,832 noncitizens might be registered in California, a figure DHS said came from matching public voter files against immigration records on names, birth dates, addresses and Social Security numbers. On October 13 the Justice Department handed the state a thumb drive with a shorter list, “more than 20,000” names, and 48 hours to segregate their ballots. On Monday it charged 28 people, all of whom it says appear on that list. The department says at least eight of the 28 voted more than once, including in the June primary.
California had 23,164,977 registered voters as of September 4, by the Secretary of State’s own count. Divide the charges into that and you get 0.00012 percent, or about one charged voter for every 827,000 on the rolls. Divide the charges into the DHS claim and you get a different kind of number: for every person the government has found enough evidence to charge, it told the public there were 6,815 more. The 20,000 list does not fare much better. It yielded one complaint per 714 names, and DHS has told reporters that it never lowered the 190,000 figure, it simply has not finished “manually verifying” the rest.
That verification is the part nobody can check. Newsweek pressed the department on how the list was built and got a description of matches run across USCIS files, State Department and Social Security records, and commercial third-party data, graded high, medium or low confidence. The department confirmed it did not use SAVE, the federal citizenship database. Weber’s office asked for the underlying data and methodology in July and had not received it when the thumb drive arrived.
Why SAVE Matters Here
On October 9, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan vacated the department’s Voter List Maintenance Policy, the program under which it had demanded voter rolls from nearly every state to run them through SAVE and press for removals. Her opinion found Congress never gave the department that authority and cited the case of a Texas citizen whose registration was cancelled on a bad SAVE match. Four days later the department sent California the thumb drive. Voting groups told the court the California suit “appear[s] to implicate, and perhaps outright violate” that order. The department’s answer is that it used “other data sets.” Which is to say: the database a federal judge found too error-prone to use was swapped for a method the department will not describe, and the state is being sued for declining to act on it.
We covered the Supreme Court’s narrower ruling on this fight last month: it revived the citizenship database but not any federal authority to purge rolls. Sooknanan’s order fills in the second half.
The Thumb Drive
Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan received the federal list on a password-protected drive with the password handwritten on a sticky note. His office did not open it, citing security. Two days later Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the lawsuit against Weber and Logan, saying California “has refused to comply and intends to facilitate noncitizens in voting.” More than 6 million ballots had already been returned when the suit was filed. The department is asking a federal court to stop the state from counting the ballots of 20,000 people it will not identify by method, in an election already underway.
Who the 28 Are
Every one of the 28 is a lawful permanent resident. The charges are false statements on a voter registration form, voting as an alien in a federal election, and in some cases false claims of citizenship on a naturalization application. The registration and naturalization counts carry up to five years; the voting count is a misdemeanor with a one-year maximum. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said “every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen.” Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said California “is mailing ballots to noncitizens.”
Nothing in the complaints says these 28 voted as a bloc, were recruited, or changed an outcome. Green-card holders who register are, in the main, people who checked the wrong box on a DMV form or believed a long residency made them eligible. That is still a crime. It is not an election-security emergency, and the department’s own count says so.
What the Timing Is For
The arrests landed on the first full week of early voting, in the state with the most House seats in play, 15 days before an election in which the governing party is behind. Governor Gavin Newsom called the suit “a sad, desperate attempt” to suppress California voters. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s question is the one the department has not answered: “What happened to those 170,000? They just got those wrong.”
We think the honest reading is simpler than either side’s statement. A 190,000 figure was sent to the secretary of state in July, it produced 28 complaints in October, and the gap between those numbers is the story. The department should publish the method behind the 20,000 list or withdraw the suit built on it, and DHS should retract the 190,000 claim until it can show its work. Prosecuting 28 people for lying on a form is ordinary law enforcement. Announcing it as the proof of a stolen-election theory, with the arithmetic pointing the other way, is a campaign operation run out of a federal building.
What Happens Next
The lawsuit against Weber and Logan is pending in federal court in California, with the state arguing it cannot lawfully segregate ballots on an unverified list and the department seeking an emergency order before November 3. Whatever that judge does, the 28 complaints will proceed on their own facts, one defendant at a time, which is how voter fraud has always been handled in this country. It has never needed a thumb drive and a press conference.