Immigrant rights group finds dozens of U.S. citizens on DOJ’s California alleged noncitizen voter list

An immigrant rights group told a federal court Saturday there are dozens of U.S. citizens on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) list of nearly 21,000 alleged noncitizens registered to vote in California.

In addition, the DOJ’s list also likely contains thousands of people who are not currently registered to vote in the Golden State. Researchers who reviewed the list warned that these and other errors could lead to hundreds of thousands of people being wrongly identified as noncitizens.

The Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) said the review, conducted by data scientists from the Voting Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), indicates that the department’s list contains significant errors and wrongfully threatens the voting rights of eligible voters.

The list’s accuracy is key, as it is at the center of the Trump administration’s extraordinary lawsuit seeking to bar California and Los Angeles County election officials from counting ballots cast by people it alleges are noncitizens. The DOJ has also threatened state and local officials with criminal penalties if they do not comply with its ballot demands.

The review came after the DOJ gave CHIRLA what appears to be a copy of the list. That transfer marked the first time the Trump administration allowed a nongovernmental third party to review the list’s accuracy.

The DOJ has disclosed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) produced the list based on an extensive probe into California’s voter registration records. However, the Trump administration has refused to provide details on that probe, including exactly how it obtained the state’s heavily guarded voter roll.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the department to transfer the list by 5 p.m. ET Friday. Though the DOJ initially said it would appeal the order, CHIRLA indicated that the department ultimately turned over the list.

Boasberg ordered the transfer to give CHIRLA materials that could potentially bolster the coalition’s arguments that it has standing to challenge the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure California and other states to screen voter rolls for alleged noncitizen voters.

CHIRLA argued Saturday that its lawsuit, first filed in September, must go forward because the review found several of its members who are naturalized U.S. citizens on the DOJ’s list.

“Based on scientific database matching methodology, I am certain that there are at least 22 entries on the CHIRLA citizen list that fully match to the DHS ineligible list,” Matt Barreto, a political scientist and the faculty director of the UCLA Voting Rights Lab, wrote in a report detailing the review of the federal government’s list.

Barreto conducted the review with Michael Rios, a UCLA data scientist, by comparing a list of confirmed naturalized citizens who are CHIRLA members to DHS’s list of ineligible voters. Combined, Barreto and Rios said they have decades of experience researching California’s voter roll.

In addition to those 22 CHIRLA members, Barreto said he and Rios identified 66 other CHIRLA members “that are near certain full matches” to people on the DHS’s list. They said hundreds of other CHIRLA members were “highly likely” matches.

“Based on my experience using the California voter file and matching records using accepted methodology in the social sciences, I am certain there are entries on the CHIRLA citizen members and client list that are on the DHS ineligible list of 20,930 names,” Barreto said.

Beyond CHIRLA members, Barreto said he and Rios found that 8,880 names on DHS’s list were not found on California’s current voter roll, suggesting that 42% of the people identified by the Trump administration may not be registered to vote in the state.

Barreto and Rios also found that the federal government’s list contains extensive errors, duplications and incomplete data entries, all of which “could result in more than three hundred and fifty thousand potential false positive matches of additional U.S. citizen voters in California, putting them at risk of being disenfranchised.”

Barreto and Rios’ findings align with a preliminary review of the Trump administration’s list conducted by the Los Angeles County clerk. In that review, the clerk analyzed a 7,035-person sample of the list and found that roughly 1 in 4 people marked the U.S. as their birthplace, a strong indicator that they were citizens. The county’s review similarly found that numerous people are not active registered voters in the state.

California has the largest share of naturalized citizens among eligible voters of any U.S. state, with naturalized citizens making up roughly 21% to 22% of the state’s total eligible electorate, according to the Pew Research Center.

Through its suit, CHIRLA has alleged that the Trump administration’s campaign to scour state voter registration lists for noncitizens is based on unsupported claims, risks wrongly targeting naturalized citizens and unlawfully interferes with states’ authority to administer elections.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect that the DOJ withdrew its stay pending appeal of Boasberg’s order.