DOJ charges six additional green-card holders in California voter-registration case
The U.S. Department of Justice announced six new charges against lawful permanent residents accused of illegal voter registration, part of a broader effort to challenge roughly 20,000 ballots in California.
The Department of Justice in California has filed criminal charges against six lawful permanent residents who are alleged to have registered to vote and cast ballots despite being ineligible. The defendants, all green-card holders from Mexico, Israel, the Philippines, Canada and Iran, face a single count of making false statements on naturalization applications, with prosecutors saying they later claimed they had never registered to vote. Five of the six have been taken into custody, according to U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles.
Essayli told reporters that the defendants were identified from a list of about 20,000 voters the DOJ believes may have been fraudulently registered. He said the government used “third-party databases” to compile the list and, while acknowledging it may not be 100% accurate, described the confidence level as “very, very high.”
The DOJ is simultaneously pursuing a lawsuit seeking to have California election officials set aside the contested ballots until citizenship status can be verified. State officials have argued that the list and methodology are unreliable, that removing the ballots would be logistically impossible during an election, and that it could disenfranchise eligible voters. Multiple judges have blocked the DOJ’s attempts, and the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s appeals.
Legal experts note that non-citizen voting is rare and often results from confusion rather than intentional fraud. An immigrants’ rights group that sued over the DOJ’s use of immigration data found that more than 40% of the names on the DOJ’s list could not be located on California’s voter rolls. The 20,000 names represent a small fraction of the state’s more than 23 million registered voters.
Critics have highlighted the timing of the arrests, saying they occur in the midst of an election cycle and could be perceived as politically motivated. The DOJ’s public presentation of the arrests, including on-camera mugshots, has drawn condemnation from former prosecutors and defense attorneys. A federal judge recently barred the DOJ from threatening election officials with criminal prosecution for processing the contested ballots.