Trump Threatens Jail for California Officials Over Voting Issues
President Donald Trump warned that California officials could face jail time if they disregard a notice from the Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding mail-in ballots. This notification specifies that approximately 200,000 individuals identified as potential noncitizens should not be included in midterm election counts.
On Truth Social, Trump stated emphatically, “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”
Alongside his statement, he released a letter from the DOJ addressed to the Los Angeles County Counsel’s Office. The letter indicated that there would be “significant” repercussions for anyone “facilitating or ignoring” the illegal inclusion of noncitizens in federal election voting.
Earlier, the DOJ initiated legal action against California after supplying state and local election authorities with a USB drive. This drive contained voter registration data, along with a request to compare 20,000 names flagged by the Department of Homeland Security as non-U.S. citizens. They were given a tight 48-hour window to conduct this comparison, as reported by the Hill.
Earlier in the week, the DOJ had sent a letter to election officials with a password to access the contents of the USB drive.
The lawsuit explained, “If California was unable to independently confirm the citizenship of people on that list, the Federal Government asked that California set aside ballots received from them until the person’s citizenship was confirmed.” This document was also made available online for public access, according to the DOJ.
In response, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom criticized the lawsuit as a “sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.”
He added, “The courts have made clear that the federal government has no role in how a state carries out its election process, and now, in the middle of Californians voting, they have asked local officials — who do a damn good job defending democracy — to violate federal law.”
A group known as the UCLA Voting Rights Project had previously filed a lawsuit against the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), challenging the accuracy of the numbers related to noncitizens registered to vote.
The Hill reported that this group intended to seek a temporary restraining order if the Trump administration persisted with its plans for criminal action against state officials.
In their correspondence to the DOJ, attorneys for the group stated, “Your clients’ actions in compiling the list violates established law; your efforts to employ this list to systematically purge voters, less than a month before the election, further violates the National Voter Registration Act, among other laws.”
This year, President Trump claimed that California, along with three other states, had a combined total of 250,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls, a figure that has been contested by many of his critics.
