The Justice Department is facing a fresh legal showdown over its push to have California election officials cross-check voter rolls against a USB drive supplied by the Trump administration. The UCLA Voting Rights Project has notified the DOJ that it will seek a temporary restraining order unless the administration abandons the effort, according to a letter obtained by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's office.
The letter, signed by Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, arrived with a thumb drive and a handwritten password. It claims the device contains "a list of names of people the Federal Government believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a vote by mail ballot" for the upcoming midterm elections. The demand gives counties just 48 hours to comply.
In a letter sent Wednesday, attorneys for the UCLA Voting Rights Project argued that the administration's actions violate federal law. "Your clients' actions in compiling the list violates established law; your efforts to employ this list to systematically purge voters, less than a month before the election, further violates the National Voter Registration Act, among other laws," they wrote. The group has already been in litigation with the administration over similar attempts to scrub voter rolls.
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean C. Logan said his office has no intention of even opening the drive. "We have not accessed the drive because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols. We do not consider the device a secure medium," Logan said in a statement. He also noted the letter fails to specify how many individuals are on the list or what information is contained in the records.
Logan emphasized that his office's duty to maintain accurate voter rolls must be grounded in verifiable evidence. "Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established — and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching," he said.
The administration has repeatedly tried to obtain voter data from California and other states, but courts have consistently rejected those efforts. The DOJ has lost every case it has brought on this front.
This latest maneuver follows a similar attempt by the Department of Homeland Security, which in July sent letters to California and three other states claiming they collectively had about 250,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls. However, a review of that correspondence revealed that a "preliminary review" found fewer than half that number — roughly 118,000 — matched names and other information in federal files.
The UCLA Voting Rights Project sued DHS and the DOJ in September, challenging the administration's methodology and seeking to block what it called "the list matching exercise/voter purge" demanded in the July letter. The group's latest threat escalates the standoff just weeks before Election Day, raising the stakes for both the administration and California election officials who are caught in the crossfire.
