Federal Judge Finds Trump’s Claims About Noncitizen Voting Not Credible in Scathing Ruling

In a July 16 letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asserted that a “preliminary review” indicated “there may be as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote” in her state. Weber was skeptical, and history soon underscored why. Three months later, the Trump administration cut that estimate by almost 90 percent, claiming roughly 20,000 “likely noncitizens” had received California vote-by-mail ballots.

The Justice Department gave Weber and Dean Logan, Los Angeles County’s top election official, 48 hours to determine whether any individuals on the government’s list were actually citizens. If not, the agency said, Weber and Logan should segregate those ballots and halt their processing until citizenship could be confirmed. After Weber and Logan refused to comply, the DOJ sought a temporary restraining order (TRO) from a federal judge—a request Carter rejected in a forceful ruling on Wednesday.

“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” writes U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, a Bill Clinton appointee. “This request violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections. If Plaintiff’s last-minute request for relief were granted, either party could create chaos for their own political purposes to disrupt the election process. Over 20,000 registered Californians would potentially lose the right that generations of Americans have fought to preserve.”

The DOJ delivered its list of “likely noncitizens” to Logan three weeks before Election Day. By that time, Los Angeles County had already mailed ballots to 5.9 million voters and processed 331,000 of them. Logan said he was “legally prohibited” from acting on the DOJ’s demand because the department had not explained the methodology used to compile the list, raising concerns that citizens could be deprived of their voting rights.

There was ample reason for such concerns. On July 17, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin asserted that “as many as” 15,903 noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada. The following month, when the DHS submitted a list of allegedly illegal voters to Nevada election officials, the number had fallen to 185—99 percent lower than Mullin’s original figure. It turned out that every one of those 185 voters was a U.S. citizen.

“DHS has identified over 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote” in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, Mullin claimed in July. He was echoing President Donald Trump, who for years has exaggerated the scope of illegal voting by noncitizens, often to serve his own vanity.

Trump has repeatedly asserted, for example, that he would have won the popular vote in 2016 but for “the millions of people who voted illegally,” and in January 2024 he warned that noncitizen voters “could very well affect the next election.” In a speech the night before Mullin’s announcement, Trump contended that the DHS had “identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.”

Judging from Nevada’s experience, the actual figure may be close to zero. It is difficult to determine, because the DHS’s methods remain opaque.

In the California case, Carter notes, the DHS “purchased a voter file that appeared to reflect ‘the actual voter rolls in California, that as of August 2025, may be used for the 2026 federal election.'” It “then ‘enhance[d]’ the voter data through a ‘reliable third-party data analytics'” and used records maintained by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to locate “an internal USCIS immigration number” that “may” correspond to each registered voter. “The matches are scored,” Carter observes, “because ‘the resulting data may be incomplete, outdated, or mismatched.'”

The DHS “then compared the potential identity matches to Department of State and Social Security Administration data to screen out U.S. citizens,” Carter adds. “In the next step, a confidence level was assigned (where a high score supported a ‘strong identity link’) and a manual review was conducted for each match to ‘determine which registered voters'” were “likely to be aliens.” Then came “a ‘quality review’ to identify issues such as ‘duplicate entries’ and ‘incomplete records,'” followed by an “enrichment process” that utilized ‘additional unique identifiers’ to ‘improve’ the matching process.”

The government did not initially disclose the source of the “reliable third-party data analytics.” But it later disclosed that “the third-party platform it relied on was LexisNexis,” Carter notes. “It remains unknown how LexisNexis performed its analysis, such as how it ‘linked names to Social Security numbers not available on the California public voter file.’ Plaintiff likewise did not explain what its ‘enrichment process’ entailed or how it occurred. Plaintiff also provided ‘no error rates’ or ‘validation against a reliable benchmark’ that would enable a determination of the accuracy of its findings. Omissions of this critical information prevent an evaluation of Plaintiff’s procedure, including how Plaintiff reduced its initial claim of nearly 200,000 alleged noncitizens to 20,000 individuals.”

Potential sources of error include confusing people with similar or identical names and outdated records that do not reflect recent naturalizations. Because it is unclear how the DHS attempted to address such issues, Weber and Logan were understandably reluctant to rely on the Trump administration’s list, given its history of drastically shrinking the purported number of illegally registered voters.

“It is well-documented that matching voter registration records with data from other administrative databases ‘presents numerous challenges,'” Carter writes. And given the potential for error, he states, “Plaintiff’s allegations are not credible.” He adds that the TRO sought by the Justice Department “would likely lead to voter disenfranchisement” and “would create a significant administrative burden for Defendants, leading to chaos and upending the election.”

In any case, Carter asserts, the Trump administration lacks the standing to pursue such an order. The government’s principal argument was that California officials, by refusing to segregate ballots from people on its list, were interfering with its enforcement of 18 U.S.C. 611, which makes it a misdemeanor for “any alien to vote” in a federal election.

“Defendants do not ‘interfere’ with the United States’ ability to enforce Section 611 by
administering an ongoing election in accordance with established State and Federal law, rather than assuming new obligations pursuant to a federal criminal law they are not responsible for enforcing,” Carter writes. It is well established that state officials have no obligation to enforce federal law, he notes, and that they cannot be “commandeered” to do so.

Nor does the federal government need such assistance to enforce Section 611. “The very same day the United States filed its TRO [application] in this Court, the Department of Justice brought charges against 28 individuals” in California under that law, Carter notes. It is not clear how many of those defendants, who represent 0.0001 percent of California’s 23 million registered voters, actually cast ballots. But “if fraudulent voting occurs,” Carter says, “the United States should uphold the law and bring additional Section 611 indictments against those non-citizens it believes actually voted illegally in the current—or a prior—election.”

The Constitution assigns states the primary duty of conducting elections, subject to explicit limits laid out by Congress. But the DOJ’s actions in this case “are indicative of a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference by federal officials,” Carter writes. The department “has filed at least thirty-one lawsuits in federal district courts across the country seeking complete voter rolls from the States. Out of the twenty-six decided cases, the DOJ has prevailed in precisely zero.”

Besides its unsuccessful bid to obtain state voter rolls, Carter notes, “the United States has also sought that States act based on the Executive’s own lists.” Yet “sister district courts across the country have cast doubt” on the reliability of those lists for the same reasons Carter cites in this case.

On October 23, the Justice Department “sent letters to every county in California requiring them to set aside the votes of alleged non-citizens,” Carter notes. “The letters stated that election officials ‘risk significant federal scrutiny’ if they failed to comply with the Government’s demands. The government reiterated its threat in open court yesterday, stating that State and County election officials who do not comply with their letter risk federal charges under 18 U.S.C. § 2, which criminalizes aiding and abetting the commission of a criminal offense. The court reiterates what it said yesterday: these threats must stop.”