A California elections official says the Justice Department sent him a sloppy list of alleged noncitizen voters and pressed him to act under threat of prosecution, The Guardian reported on Thursday.
Keaton Denlay, who runs elections as clerk-recorder and registrar in Butte County in the north of the state, said a man who identified himself as a Department of Homeland Security agent dropped off a DOJ demand letter and a two-page list Friday afternoon. The letter, signed by the U.S. attorney for the eastern district, claimed the list held 47 “likely aliens” and asked him to set aside their mail ballots within 48 hours.
It warned that anyone who knowingly tabulates them risks becoming “aiders and abettors to a federal crime.” The letter misspelled his name.
Denlay said the list didn’t match the letter. The two pages were duplicates, he said, and held 46 names with one repeated rather than 47. By his count, 32 of the 45 distinct names weren’t even on Butte’s active voter rolls and had never been mailed ballots, and seven lacked enough detail to check. That left six names DOJ could argue were ineligible.
He described the pages as "a printout of a badly formatted spreadsheet," The Guardian reported, whose cut-off columns made the data hard to verify.
Denlay said California law requires “extraordinary proof” from anyone challenging a voter, and that “this list didn’t even come close.” He declined to act and said he isn’t worried about the threats.
The DOJ has spent the final weeks of the midterms targeting California, claiming 20,000 voters are likely noncitizens and suing to block their ballots. State officials reject that, and San Benito County’s registrar said some of the 33 names his office received weren’t registered there.
A key Justice Department figure involved in the effort, Bill Essayli, was found by a federal judge this week to be illegally serving in his role.