The Justice Department Has Lost 26 Voter Data Lawsuits and Won None. Today It Sued California to Freeze 20,000 Ballots Over a List on a Thumb Drive.
The 48-hour deadline ran out at noon Eastern, the lawsuit followed, and the department still will not say how it picked the names
By Mike Dean,
By Daily Rumble | October 15, 2026
The Justice Department sued California on Thursday to stop the state from counting the mail ballots of more than 20,000 voters it says are likely noncitizens, Reuters reported. The suit, filed in federal court in the Central District of California, came after a 48-hour deadline the department set on Tuesday in letters from acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan. The list behind it arrived in Los Angeles on a password-protected thumb drive, with the password handwritten on a note, according to the Associated Press and CBS News. The department wants a judge to bar California from “tabulating in federal elections vote-by-mail ballots received” from those voters until their citizenship is verified. It already lost in court trying to get California’s voter data, and it still will not explain how it built the list.
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Step back and look at the order of events. In September 2025, the Justice Department sued California for its voter file. In January, a federal judge threw the case out. In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed California had as many as 191,000 noncitizens on its rolls. Weber asked for the method and the data behind that number, and DHS refused, according to the Sacramento Bee. Now, with ballots in the mail since Oct. 5, the department has produced names anyway, set a deadline measured in hours, and sued the moment it expired.
If the government already has a reliable way to identify noncitizen voters, why has it failed to win a single one of the lawsuits it brought to get the data it said it needed to find them? And if it does not, what exactly is on that thumb drive?
A demand with a stopwatch and no method
McCotter’s letters ask officials to “segregate, not cancel” the mail ballots of anyone on the list whose citizenship cannot be confirmed, and to stop sending ballots to listed people who have not received one yet. Returned ballots would not be counted “until citizenship has been determined,” Reuters reported. “Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” McCotter wrote, according to Reuters and NBC News. If California does not comply, the letters say, “the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief.”
Notice what the letters leave out. They did not say how many names were on the list; the 20,000 figure surfaced only in the lawsuit. A department spokesperson told the Sacramento Bee it had found thousands of potentially ineligible voters but did not answer questions about how it verified citizenship. Department spokeswoman Kiersten Pels told Reuters the department “will take all necessary legal action to protect election integrity and ensure compliance with federal law.”
Logan has not opened the drive. “We do not consider the device a secure medium,” he said, according to CBS News, adding that removing a voter has to rest on verifiable information, not unconfirmed data matching. Weber said her office never received a list at all, and that the department’s efforts “serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” NBC News reported.
The courts already answered the question
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for unredacted voter rolls, with plans to share the data with DHS to screen for noncitizens. According to Reuters and CBS News, it has lost 26 of those cases and has not won one. In January, U.S. District Judge David Carter dismissed the federal suit for the state’s voter list, finding the demand ran into privacy law. “The centralization of this information by the federal government would have a chilling effect on voter registration,” Carter wrote, Reuters reported.
That ruling matters here. Having failed to get the state’s records through the front door, the government now arrives with its own list and asks California to act on it within two days. Reuters reported last month that DHS used a commercial data broker to pull sensitive voter information that does not appear on public rolls, and officials and experts warned that approach could wrongly flag citizens.
The track record of these lists is not good. In July, the administration claimed Nevada had 1,500 noncitizen voters. After federal officials identified them to the state, the number of registered noncitizens turned out to be zero, the AP reported. A Georgia audit under Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger found 20 noncitizens among 8.2 million registered voters, according to the Sacramento Bee.
What’s actually happening beneath the surface
Federal law bars systematic voter list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election, NBC News noted. The department’s answer is to ask for ballots to be set aside rather than voters removed, which a spokesperson described to NBC as sequestering ballots, not changing the voter list. The practical result for a voter whose name is wrongly on that drive is the same: a ballot that sits in a pile and does not count until someone in Washington says so.
Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department official in the Obama administration who contributes to NBC News, put the legal position simply: “California doesn’t have to do anything about it.” On whether the administration is laying groundwork to claim fraud, he did not hedge. “Of course they are, 100% they are,” he told NBC.
The pattern is wider than California. Election officials in Georgia, Connecticut, Nevada and Washington state told NBC News they recently received federal subpoenas for election records. Stuart Holmes, Washington’s director of elections, said he sees “some groundwork laid out for postelection challenges.” And on Monday, three days before this deadline, federal prosecutors announced 16 new criminal cases over alleged noncitizen voting and fraudulent registration, Reuters reported. Daily Rumble covered that announcement this week. Each case deserves its day in court. Set against roughly 170 million registered voters, the figure Reuters used in its September analysis, sixteen cases do not describe a flood.
Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber, who leads the state association of county election officials, called the 48-hour window “completely unreasonable” in an interview with the AP. “It would take more than 48 hours to even begin to get the full picture,” she said.
What to watch
The deadline passed at noon Eastern today, and the lawsuit followed within hours. Watch whether the department asks for an emergency order before ballots start being counted, and which judge draws the case, since Carter has already ruled against it once in the same district. Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, told Reuters the suit would likely face legal hurdles. “I just don’t see the federal authority to do that over a state,” he said. Watch whether letters to other counties surface; CBS News reported, citing a person familiar with the matter, that similar letters went to other California counties. And watch the language. California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the letter part of a pattern of “absolutely false conspiracy theories that there is widespread voter fraud when there is not,” according to the AP.
A list nobody will explain, delivered on a device the county won’t plug in, with a deadline no election office can meet, does not have to win in court to do its work. It only has to exist on Nov. 4, when someone wants a reason to say the count in California cannot be trusted.
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Sources:
Reuters via Yahoo News — DOJ sues California to block votes from alleged noncitizens — https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/doj-sues-california-block-votes-171601356.html
Reuters via Yahoo News — Exclusive: US Justice Department threatens California over alleged noncitizen voters, letters show — https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/exclusive-us-justice-department-threatens-034849746.html
NBC News — Justice Department threatens legal action against California over alleged noncitizen voters — https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/justice-department-threatens-legal-action-california-noncitizens-rcna603536
CBS News — Top U.S. DOJ official orders California to review list of possible noncitizens who received mail ballots — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/justice-department-california-noncitizens-mail-ballots/
Associated Press via ABC7 — Justice Department threatens California with legal action over claim of noncitizens on voter rolls — https://abc7ny.com/story/justice-department-threatens-california-legal-action-claim-noncitizens-voter-rolls/19938844/
Sacramento Bee via Yahoo News — Trump’s DOJ gives California 48 hours to act on alleged noncitizen voters — https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-doj-gives-california-48-211829183.html
Reuters via Yahoo News — US judge dismisses Justice Department lawsuit seeking California voter details — https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-judge-dismisses-justice-department-021106908.html