Justice Department faces legal threats after pushing California to match voter list with USB drive

A voting rights group warned the Department of Justice (DOJ) that it plans to sue if the department doesn’t back away from a demand made to various California voting authorities which ordered them to cross-reference their voter lists with those on a USB provided by the Trump administration within 48 hours.

According to a copy of the letter shared by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, the correspondence included a thumb drive and a handwritten password to access the files.

Sent by acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, the letter claims the USB includes “a list of names of people the Federal Government believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a vote by mail ballot” for the upcoming midterm elections.

An outside group with ongoing litigation against the Trump administration notified the DOJ that they will seek a temporary restraining order Thursday if the administration doesn’t abandon its plans.

“Your clients’ actions in compiling the list violates established law; your efforts to employ this list to systematically purge voters, less than a month before the election, further violates the National Voter Registration Act, among other laws,” attorneys for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Voting Rights Project wrote Wednesday in a letter to the DOJ.

The DOJ did not respond to request for comment.

The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office said it does not intend to even access the data sent by the DOJ.

“We have not accessed the drive because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols. We do not consider the device a secure medium. Additionally, the letter does not specify the number of individuals involved or describe the information contained in the records,” Dean Logan, who also serves as the county clerk, said in a statement.

“Maintaining accurate voter registration records is a fundamental responsibility of our office. Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established — and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching.”

The DOJ has taken a number of actions seeking to obtain voter rolls from California and other states, only to be rebuffed by the courts, losing in every single case.

California was also a target of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which sent a letter in July to the state along with three others claiming that collectively the four states had some 250,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls.

But a review of the correspondence sent to the four states shows that the federal government through a “preliminary review” found less than half that number — 118,000 — matched names and other information in its files.

The UCLA Voting Rights Project sued DHS and the DOJ in September, questioning how the administration came up with their claim that some 190,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in California and seeking to block them from imposing “the list matching exercise/voter purge” exercise demanded in the July letter.