The Justice Department handed California a password-protected thumb drive, a secret list of suspected noncitizen voters, and just 48 hours to check it.
Quick Take
- Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter sent letters to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan on October 13, 2026.
- The letters included a thumb drive with names the federal government believes are likely noncitizens who received mail ballots.
- Officials were told to segregate, not cancel, those ballots within 48 hours or face possible legal action.
- Los Angeles County says it has not even opened the drive, citing data security rules and an unverified device.
The Letter That Landed on Two Desks
McCotter’s letter described a “password-protected thumb drive with a list of names the Federal Government believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a vote-by-mail ballot.” The letter did not ask officials to toss these ballots outright. It asked them to set the ballots aside, called segregation, until citizenship could be confirmed through proper checks.
The request went to two addresses: the Secretary of State’s office in Sacramento and the Registrar-Recorder’s office in Los Angeles County. Both came with the same short deadline and the same warning. If the review didn’t happen fast enough, the Justice Department signaled it would consider taking the matter to court.
A List Officials Haven’t Even Opened
Secretary of State Shirley Weber said her office never actually received the list of names. The federal government sent the thumb drive to Los Angeles County instead, leaving the state’s top election official without the very data she was asked to act on.
Dean Logan confirmed his office got the drive, along with a handwritten note holding the password. But his office has not plugged it in. Logan said the device does not meet the county’s data privacy and information security standards, so the names inside remain unread by the people asked to check them.
Verification, Not Assumption, Logan Says
Logan drew a clear line between suspicion and proof. He said any decision to strip someone of voting eligibility has to rest on verified facts, not a data match nobody outside the federal government has examined. That standard matters, because a name landing on a list is not the same as a confirmed citizenship problem.
The letter itself reportedly never said how many names were on the list. Without that number, nobody can judge whether this touches a handful of records or thousands. The Justice Department’s own wording called the names “likely noncitizens,” a screening label, not a legal finding that anyone voted illegally.
What the Numbers Say About Noncitizen Voting
History offers useful context here. Federal prosecutors have charged just 129 people nationwide under the federal law against noncitizen voting since it was created in 1996, with the Trump administration bringing a sharp majority of those cases in recent years. That is a tiny number spread across three decades and hundreds of millions of ballots cast.
A Brennan Center survey of 42 election jurisdictions after the 2016 election found about 30 suspected noncitizen votes among 23.5 million ballots cast, a rate near 0.0001 percent. Researchers have repeatedly traced inflated noncitizen-voting claims back to clerical mistakes and flawed database matching rather than actual fraud.
Why the Clock and the Lockbox Matter
None of that history proves this list is wrong. It does explain why election officials want to see the underlying data before acting. Citizenship checks normally take real time, carefully matching names against immigration and naturalization records. A 48-hour window squeezed against a midterm election calendar leaves little room for that kind of careful work.
JUST IN: California just got 48 hours.
The Justice Department wants election officials to review suspected noncitizen voters and set aside their mail ballots until citizenship is confirmed.
If the prescribed course of action wasn’t followed by Oct. 15 at noon ET, the letter…
— The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) October 15, 2026
California law already bars noncitizens from registering to vote, and the state has its own removal process for ineligible names. The real dispute isn’t whether noncitizen voting should be illegal. Everyone agrees it should be. The fight is over whether a locked thumb drive and a two-day deadline are the right way to prove it happened.
Sources:
cbsnews.com, yahoo.com, nbcnews.com, abc11.com, cnn.com, news.bloomberglaw.com, fairelectionscenter.org
