More Than 4 in 10 Names on DOJ's Alleged Noncitizen Voter List Match No California Voter, Analysis Finds
More than four in ten names flagged by the Trump administration as possible noncitizen voters in California cannot be found anywhere on the state's voter rolls, according to the first outside analysis of a closely guarded Justice Department list. Researchers matched 20,930 names supplied by the department against California's current voter file and found 8,880 — about 42% — with no corresponding voter, in a court filing submitted on Saturday by an immigrant rights group.
The analysis was conducted by two data scientists with the UCLA Voting Rights Project. Applying the government's own matching methodology, they found that nearly 7,500 naturalized citizens in California were "highly likely" to be incorrectly flagged as ineligible. The filing identified at least 22 people on the list as U.S. citizens, with many more entries possibly corresponding to confirmed citizens — meaning the list appears to suffer both from phantom entries and from mislabeled real voters.
The researchers said the administration apparently stripped voter identification numbers from the names before handing the list over, calling that number the most crucial data point for verification. Without it, local election officials struggle to tell whether a flagged person is on their rolls at all, or whether the list contains duplicates of the same individual. Several California counties that ran quick checks of the list on their own reported numerous errors.
The Justice Department has defended the effort in stark terms. "Every ballot cast by an ineligible voter cancels out the vote of an American citizen," department spokesperson Kiersten V. Pels said, adding that it "makes no apology for protecting those votes." Courts have repeatedly ruled the other way in the past week: on Oct. 28, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter denied the department's request to stop California from counting mail ballots from about 20,000 questioned voters, calling the allegations "not credible"; an appeals court then rejected an emergency appeal; and on Friday another federal judge barred the department from threatening election workers and ordered the disputed list shared with lawyers for the challengers. A separate Friday order told the department to stop sending new demands to state officials, a decision the administration appealed on Saturday. President Donald Trump claimed his department had found "20,000, but potentially Hundreds of Thousands, and maybe even Millions" of fraudulent votes.
The immediate burden falls on two groups: naturalized citizens, who are most exposed to false matches under the list's logic, and county election officials caught between state laws requiring them to keep processing mail ballots and federal threats of criminal prosecution. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, known as CHIRLA, which filed the analysis jointly with the UCLA researchers, said the review proves that pressuring officials "under criminal and civil threats endangers the voting rights" of its members and clients. The filing was co-signed by Xavier Becerra, a Democratic candidate for California governor and an adviser to the UCLA Voting Rights Project.
CHIRLA and the UCLA project sued the Department of Homeland Security in early October to block the use of federal immigration data to challenge state voter rolls, citing cases in other states where federal data wrongly swept in thousands of citizens. With a judge now ordering the full disputed list disclosed to the challengers' lawyers, the next phase centers on a method-by-method audit of how the names were generated — alongside the department's parallel demands in at least 13 states. If the error rate holds up, the fight over how California counts its midterm ballots is far from over.