Federal prosecutors announced charges against 28 people in California who the government says registered to vote — and in some cases cast ballots — despite being noncitizens.
Justice Department officials said the cases are evidence that noncitizens are on California’s voter rolls, despite the state’s insistence that the issue is virtually nonexistent.
“Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen,” said acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter.
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The announcement came just days after the Justice Department sued California, saying the state is ignoring a list of some 20,000 names of potential noncitizens the federal government had provided for more investigation.
DOJ asked a judge to block the state from counting any ballots cast by those 20,000 names, until the state can verify them.
Mr. McCotter said all 28 of the defendants announced Monday are on the list of 20,000, and are still listed as registered voters.
“California refused to look at that list. Today’s charges show exactly what that refusal puts at risk. California must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted,” Mr. McCotter said.
Of the 28, four were charged in the state’s southern federal district, 13 in the central district focused on Los Angeles, five in the northern district that includes San Francisco and six cases in the eastern district, which includes Sacramento.
Some of them voted in the distant past, well outside the statute of limitations for illegal voting. But they are being charged with lying about their vote in more recent citizenship applications.
California had more than 23 million registered voters as of the end of 2025.
The state in the past has insisted it doesn’t have a problem of noncitizen voting.
When The Washington Times in 2024 sought records of noncitizen voters booted from the rolls, the California secretary of state’s office reported that it didn’t “have any data to report on instances of noncitizens voting or being incorrectly registered and removed from the voting rolls.”
Local jurisdictions, though, have acknowledged the issue.
Orange County last year notified the federal government it removed 17 people from its voter rolls after realizing they weren’t citizens. The county said it investigated after receiving complaints from noncitizens that they received ballots in the mail under California’s all-mail election system.
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