The Justice Department charged 28 green-card holders in California on Monday with crimes tied to registering or voting as citizens. Eleven were arrested. Every one of the 28, the department says, appears on a list of more than 20,000 “likely noncitizen registrants” it handed California election officials on Oct. 13.
The numbers side by side.
- 28 people charged.
- More than 20,000 names on the federal list.
- 23,164,977 registered voters in California as of Sept. 4.
By BTP’s math, the 28 are at most 0.14% of the list and about 0.012% of the state’s voters. The other 19,972-plus names on the list have not been charged with anything.
What the charges say. All 28 are lawful permanent residents, people with legal status who are not citizens and cannot vote in federal elections. Prosecutors say they claimed citizenship when they registered, and many voted. The main charges are lying on a naturalization application, and for some, fraudulent voter registration. Both are felonies carrying up to five years. These are complaints. Everyone charged is presumed innocent.
The fight behind it. DOJ says it sent the list so California would set aside those voters’ mail ballots until citizenship could be confirmed. California declined, and the United States sued. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said California “must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted.”
What the government has not shown. The release does not say how the list was built, which databases flagged the names, how many on it have been checked, or how many turned out to be citizens. A name on a list is not a crime. Twenty-eight charges are the evidence so far.
Illegal votes should be prosecuted. But a list of 20,000 suspects is not 20,000 crimes, and the people on it deserve to see the government show its work.
Update: what the lawsuit says about the list. The government’s complaint, filed Oct. 15 in federal court in Los Angeles, describes the method the press release left out. It says U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services matched voter records against its own files using third-party software, kept only “high confidence” matches tied to an alien number, checked for naturalization, State Department and Social Security death records, and sent the result to Homeland Security Investigations. It also says California has not run its rolls through the federal SAVE citizenship check, so this review was done without it. The complaint asks the court to order California to set aside mail ballots from people on the list until their citizenship is verified. It does not say how many names on the list have been confirmed as noncitizens one by one. The government’s own word for them is “likely.”
Updated Oct. 19, 2026, 10:44 p.m. ET: added the Justice Department’s complaint, read in full.