Kathrine Frich
California officials are flatly refusing to hold the ballots back.
As election day gets closer, tensions between local officials and Washington often start to boil over.
Running a statewide vote takes months of careful planning, and nobody likes a last-minute curveball.
Now, a strange delivery in the mail has sparked a major courtroom showdown on the West Coast.
A sticky note password
On Thursday, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department sued California election leaders to stop them from counting certain mail-in ballots ahead of the November 3 midterms.
According to the Associated Press cited by HuffPost, federal officials claim 20,000 people on the state’s voter rolls are “likely” noncitizens and want their ballots held back until their legal status is checked.
The legal fight began after acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter gave the state 48 hours to review the names. How did the government send that sensitive list? According to the AP, Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan received a thumb drive on Tuesday with the password scribbled “on a sticky note.”
Logan called the drive unsafe to use. David Becker, who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, backed him up. “Election offices do not just stick thumb drives into their technology, for very good reason,” Becker told the AP, calling the lawsuit “fairly frivolous.”
Shifting numbers and pushback
California officials are flatly refusing to hold the ballots back. According to the AP, Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote to the Justice Department noting that Washington has offered zero proof for its claims, calling the sudden demand “an emergency of the DOJ’s creation.”
And the numbers keep shifting. Back in the summer, the Department of Homeland Security claimed 190,000 noncitizens were registered in California without showing how they got that figure. At a Thursday press briefing reported by the AP, California Attorney General Rob Bonta pointed out the massive drop to 20,000 names.
“What happened to those 170,000? They just got those wrong,” Bonta said, adding that federal law bans states from scrubbing voter lists within 90 days of an election.
Still, federal prosecutors insist the lawsuit is necessary. “This is not political or controversial,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli wrote on X, as cited by the AP. “We will not allow California to dilute the votes of American citizens.”
