The midterm election is over, but election officials and civil rights lawyers say the Trump administration's hunt for noncitizens on state voter rolls — and its pressure on local officials, especially in California — is not, NPR reported.
"It's clear that there is this drive to try to conjure up facts that just don't exist. I don't think that's going to change," James Williams, the county executive of Santa Clara County, told NPR. "So we fully are prepared to continue to deal with this."
In recent weeks federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against dozens of people accused of voting or registering to vote without being citizens, NPR reported. Compared with the overall number of voters, noncitizen voting remains exceptionally rare, the story said, and the administration has touted what turned out to be grossly inflated numbers of noncitizens on state rolls. In mid-October, federal officials alleged they had found 20,000 "likely" noncitizens on California's voter rolls. The Justice Department sued the state to try to stop officials from counting ballots of voters whose citizenship had not been verified. A federal judge and a federal appeals court rejected those requests, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.
In the days before Election Day, with that lawsuit still pending, U.S. attorneys in California sent grand jury subpoenas to several counties seeking records on how local officials responded to the Justice Department's demands. The department dropped the lawsuit last week but has not rescinded the subpoenas, NPR reported. "We have ongoing cases and investigations in various states surrounding voter process," Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a Thursday press conference. "We are actively, and will continue to investigate election integrity cases criminally and civilly, and that wasn't expected to start or stop — no matter what the results of the election were last week."
Recent court losses may still constrain the next round of federal intervention. Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, told NPR she expects the administration to "keep at this" but that "there are just a lot of court losses that are going to be really difficult for them to maneuver around." One key ruling, issued the night before Election Day, found that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security lack statutory authority to distribute lists of purported noncitizens to election officials and that doing so also violates the Privacy Act. The federal government could appeal, NPR reported. Other orders reaffirmed that states have the authority to run their elections and questioned the credibility of the federal government's data.
For California counties already served with subpoenas, including in the Bay Area, the practical question is whether those demands remain active now that the related lawsuit has been dropped. Williams' answer, at least in Santa Clara County, is to assume the pressure will continue and to keep preparing for it.