Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent letters Tuesday to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County elections chief Dean Logan, along with a password-protected drive listing individuals the federal government believes are likely noncitizens who have already been mailed ballots for next month’s election. The department gave them 48 hours to implement a process to verify that only citizens’ votes will be counted.
Read the actual ask, because it is considerably more modest than the coming outrage will suggest. Review the list. Where you can independently confirm citizenship, confirm it and move on. Where you cannot, segregate those vote-by-mail ballots — segregate, the letter says explicitly, not cancel — and hold off on signature verification and tabulation until status is resolved. For anyone on the list who hasn’t yet been sent a ballot, pause before sending one.
Nobody is disenfranchised. Nobody’s registration is stricken. A citizen wrongly flagged gets confirmed and counted. The only vote that fails to count is one cast by a person who turns out not to be a citizen, which federal law already prohibits. That’s the entire controversy.
And the timing is the point. Prosecution is a post-mortem. By the time the Justice Department charges someone with voting illegally — and it has charged more than forty people in the past month — the ballot has been opened, separated from its envelope, and folded into the count. It cannot be retrieved. The only moment at which an ineligible vote can be stopped is before tabulation, which is exactly where McCotter is trying to intervene.
California has had this information since July 16, when Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin first wrote to Weber about suspected noncitizens on the rolls. Her July 23 reply is instructive for what it omitted. She did not deny that noncitizens are registered. She did not address whether they would automatically receive mailed ballots. She did not produce findings showing the flagged individuals were citizens. What she did was question DHS’s methodology and demand to know how the federal government obtained California’s voter list.
That list, with Social Security numbers redacted, is available to parties, campaigns, researchers, and the people who send you mailers. It is not a state secret. And Weber knows this; she was just playing a delaying game. Now, three months have now passed. The ballots have gone out.
And the state’s recent legislative priority tells you how seriously Sacramento takes this. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a measure making certain ballot interference a felony — framed as protecting elections, structured in a way that complicates after-the-fact federal investigation. Pair that with a refusal to verify beforehand and you have a system engineered to make the question unanswerable at both ends — all so illegal aliens can illegally vote in a federal election.
Meanwhile the state already has a conviction on the books: former Lodi councilman Shakir Khan pleaded no contest to fourteen election fraud felonies, having registered noncitizens living abroad, including a brother in Pakistan who cast a California ballot in 2020.
California is on the clock: 48 hours. Check the names or face the consequences.
