Federal agents have arrested multiple noncitizens this year for registering and voting in California, and newly released federal data claims roughly 20,000 possible noncitizens remain on the state’s voter rolls. The disclosure comes alongside a federal lawsuit demanding California quarantine mail-in ballots from suspected noncitizens until their eligibility can be verified before any votes are counted.
In San Francisco, Russian citizen Elizaveta Shuvalova was registered to vote until she returned an absentee ballot with a note reading, “I am a Russian citizen!” In Oakland, people told election officials directly on their voter registration forms that they were not U.S. citizens — and were registered to vote anyway.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation has documented a pattern connecting California’s sanctuary city policies to hundreds of noncitizens ending up on voter rolls across the state.
The enforcement push is part of what’s being called Operation Protect the Vote. J. Christian Adams, a commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights and president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, says more arrests should be expected as the federal government applies scrutiny that was largely absent for decades, even though noncitizen voting has been a federal crime for years.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called the enforcement effort “suppression.”
The legal fight now heading toward the courts centers on timing. Federal law bars systematic removal of voters from rolls within 90 days of an election, and quarantining ballots may fall under that restriction. Courts have historically been reluctant to disrupt voting procedures close to Election Day. The Supreme Court is expected to decide whether removing noncitizens from the rolls counts as the kind of systematic process the 90-day rule was written to block.
Adams, who has worked with government noncitizen lists before, cautions that such lists are not always accurate. He points to an earlier case in Virginia, where he was given a list of more than 6,000 people removed as noncitizens — and found that not all of them actually were noncitizens. Errors can run both ways: some names on lists have since naturalized and become citizens, while other citizens have been mistakenly flagged and removed due to inconsistent DMV answers.
Separately, a California ballot measure known as Prop. 39 would require verification that mail-in ballots are cast by the registered voter listed and that in-person voters are who they claim to be — a voter ID style measure. Polling cited by Adams shows voter ID requirements draw majority support across racial and political lines, including among both Democrats and Republicans.
California currently uses automatic voter registration and automatic mail balloting without ID verification requirements, policies critics say have made it easier for noncitizens to end up casting ballots undetected.
