A dispute between California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office and Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, has focused on how election officials should respond to a federal list of more than 20,000 registered voters identified as likely noncitizens.
The disagreement surfaced on social media this week as the Justice Department pursued a lawsuit seeking to require California to verify the citizenship of people on the list. The department’s complaint says U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services compared California voter-registration records with federal immigration data. DOJ lawyers described the resulting list as preliminary.
The department filed its initial complaint Oct. 15. It asked a federal court to require the state to set aside mail ballots linked to the flagged registrations until citizenship could be checked. California voters began receiving mail ballots Oct. 1, according to the report.
A court filing Tuesday from Monica Flores, an official with the Los Angeles County Registrar’s Office, described practical limits on the county’s ability to conduct such checks. Flores said the office does not maintain citizenship information independently of a voter’s attestation and is not equipped or authorized to verify citizenship. She also said it is not an investigative agency and that she knew of no state or federal law giving it investigative authority.
Flores said isolating ballots already in process would be difficult. Once a ballot signature has been verified, she explained, the ballot is separated from its identifying envelope and processed with many others. By Tuesday, the county had processed 331,000 ballots, according to her filing.
The registrar’s staff also reviewed a sample of 200 records from the Justice Department list that had Los Angeles County addresses. Flores reported that 112 of those records were for registrations marked canceled or inactive. Among records where birthplace was meaningfully reported, she said, 38.9% listed a U.S. birthplace. She also said 71.2% of the records showed no voting history.
Essayli rejected the significance of those findings in a statement to Fox News, arguing that the county could not verify citizenship or birthplace. He had earlier characterized Flores’ filing as a major concession and said on X that American citizens’ votes were being diluted in California.
Newsom’s press office responded that state registration procedures comply with a 1993 federal law. It said people who register through the Department of Motor Vehicles must attest under penalty of perjury that they are eligible to vote, including that they are U.S. citizens. The office said similar attestation requirements apply to federal mail-in registration forms. It also criticized Essayli’s understanding of election law. Essayli replied by citing federal statutes that prohibit noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
The filings and public statements reflect the lawsuit’s central question: whether California must take additional steps when federal officials flag registrations as potentially ineligible, beyond the existing voter attestations and procedures described by state officials.
The report also noted a separate Justice Department action on Monday. Federal prosecutors charged 28 people from the list, all described as lawful permanent residents, with making false statements on naturalization applications and fraudulently registering to vote. Officials said most had cast unlawful ballots. Those charges concern specific individuals and do not establish that every person on the broader list is ineligible or committed an offense.
