Staff Reports
The fight over who is — and who isn’t — on California’s voter rolls just got louder. A UCLA and immigrant-rights group analysis says a big slice of the Justice Department’s “likely noncitizen” list does not match the state voter file. The DOJ fired back, calling the analysis bogus and insisting its evidence shows thousands of likely noncitizen registrants. The result is a messy courtroom and a bigger argument about election integrity and who we can trust with voter data.
The clash: DOJ’s list vs. the UCLA/CHIRLA analysis
The recent legal filing from CHIRLA and the UCLA Voting Rights Project examined the federal list that the government shared in court. UCLA’s analysts say about 8,880 of 20,930 names — roughly 42% — don’t match anyone in California’s current voter file. That is a big number. UCLA warns the federal matching may have flagged people who later naturalized or who were mismatched by stale or messy records.
The Justice Department hasn’t taken that quietly. Bill Essayli, the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, called the UCLA/CHIRLA report “bogus” on social media and pointed to DOJ filings that say the federal matches come from USCIS records and other official sources. DOJ and its prosecutors say their list found more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants and note that they have already brought criminal cases tied to some names on the list. So you have two sides pointing to numbers and saying, “Trust us.”
Courts, counties, and questions about method
Judges have forced the government to share the disputed list so outside experts could check it — and that is how UCLA got a look. Courts so far have been cautious about DOJ’s emergency requests to segregate ballots. County officials, including Los Angeles election officials, have complained about how the data arrived and say they cannot verify citizenship beyond normal state processes. Some counties even worried about data security when the federal material came on a password-protected drive they hadn’t asked for.
Why the methodology matters
This is not just a numbers fight. It is a fight over method, privacy, and the risk of wrongly tossing a citizen’s ballot. Critics of the federal list point to matching errors, outdated immigration records, and redactions that make one-to-one checks hard. DOJ says it used official immigration records and that every potential ineligible ballot cancels a citizen’s vote. Both claims have real consequences: one risks leaving ineligible votes; the other risks disenfranchising lawful voters if the matches are sloppy.
Bottom line: accountability or chaos?
Ask yourself what you want: messy secrecy, or clear proof? If DOJ believes it has solid matches, it should lay out the method plainly and let watchdogs verify it. If California believes the list is flawed, it should let independent checks proceed and show the unredacted records where legally possible. Right now both sides are shouting past each other and voters lose trust. That is the true damage. Election security matters. So does the right of lawful, naturalized, and native citizens to have their votes counted. The public deserves a transparent answer — not another staged fight that leaves ballots and confidence on the table.
