On Monday, with Californians already voting, Trump's Justice Department announced what it calls "Operation Protect the Vote."
Federal prosecutors charged 28 legal permanent residents (green card holders) with illegally registering to vote or voting in California. Federal agents arrested at least 11 of them, according to Mother Jones, and the Justice Department says Homeland Security Investigations is leading the investigation. The announcement came 15 days before the November 3 election.
The administration is using this to argue California's voter rolls can't be trusted. The numbers say the opposite.
28 out of 23 million
California has about 23 million registered voters. According to CalMatters, prosecutors say 22 of the 28 people charged voted in at least one election, five only registered, and one cast a provisional ballot in 2020.
"Twenty-eight out of 23 million registered voters in California is just … a drop in the bucket numerically," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said. "It's 0.0001% of all the registered voters, and it makes the point that there is no widespread voter fraud."
Bonta also said that anyone who broke the law should be held accountable. Voting by noncitizens is a crime, and nobody is defending it. But independent experts and state election officials say it is exceedingly rare, as we've reported before. More than 9.4 million Californians voted in the June primary alone.
The arrests are a tool for a bigger demand
The arrests weren't just about 28 people. They were used to back up a much larger demand.
Last week, Trump's Justice Department sent Los Angeles County a list of about 20,000 people it says are "likely noncitizens" registered to vote, and demanded that their ballots be set aside. We covered that demand when it came with a 48-hour deadline and no explanation of how the list was built. When officials refused, the department sued to block those ballots from being counted. Mother Jones reports that all 28 people charged came from that list of 20,000 targets.
"Today's charges demonstrate why that lawsuit is so important," Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told reporters. Prosecutors also asked the judge to order California to set aside ballots that may have already been mailed to people on the list.
That is the point: take 28 cases and use them to justify challenging ballots from up to 20,000 people, while the election is already underway.
The administration has done this before with lists that fell apart. CalMatters notes that the Department of Homeland Security recently claimed Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its rolls. It sent Nevada only 185 names. Nevada officials checked, and all 185 were U.S. citizens.
Threatening the people who count the votes
The Justice Department is also warning California election workers that they could be charged with crimes.
"If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime," McCotter wrote to county officials and California's secretary of state, according to Mother Jones.
Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor overseeing Los Angeles, repeated it: election officials "could also face criminal consequences" if they "knowingly process ballots from noncitizens once we've informed them who the noncitizens are." In other words, the administration's unverified list becomes a threat against anyone who counts a ballot from a name on it.
Federal prosecutors have also issued grand jury subpoenas to Los Angeles election officials for voter information and sought voter records from San Diego and Orange counties, CalMatters reports. Essayli said prosecutors have charged about 113 noncitizens in 20 states in the past two months.
Why voters should worry
The administration has said it won't station federal agents at polling places. But Mother Jones points out that federal agents arresting people over voter registrations two weeks before an election can scare eligible voters anyway. ICE has already detained hundreds of U.S. citizens.
Governor Gavin Newsom last week called the administration's voter-fraud hunt "a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day."
What we know
Fifteen days before the election, Trump's Justice Department charged 28 green card holders in California, out of about 23 million registered voters, and had federal agents arrest at least 11 of them. It is using those cases to push a lawsuit that would set aside ballots from up to 20,000 people on a list it hasn't explained, and it has warned election workers they could face prosecution for counting them. When the administration made a similar claim about Nevada, every one of the 185 names it handed over turned out to be a citizen.
