First Outside Check of the Justice Department's California Voter List Finds 42 Percent of Its Names Are Not on the Rolls

The first outside check of the Justice Department's list of alleged noncitizen voters in California found that 8,880 of its 20,930 names, about 42 percent, do not match anyone on the state's current voter file. The analysis also found at least 22 United States citizens on the list.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, known as CHIRLA, filed the review in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, in its lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security. Two data scientists with the UCLA Voting Rights Project did the work: Matt Barreto, the project's faculty director, and Michael Rios. Xavier Becerra, the Democratic candidate for California governor and an adviser to the project, co-signed the filing, the Associated Press reported.

What the researchers found

Barreto and Rios compared the federal list with a list of CHIRLA members who are confirmed naturalized citizens. "Based on scientific database matching methodology, I am certain that there are at least 22 entries on the CHIRLA citizen list that fully match to the DHS ineligible list," Barreto wrote. He counted 66 more CHIRLA members as near certain matches.

The researchers also estimated that nearly 7,500 naturalized citizens were highly likely to have been flagged incorrectly under the government's matching methods, and they reported that the list carries no voter identification numbers, the key data point election officials use to confirm a match. Barreto wrote that errors, duplications and incomplete entries in the list could produce more than 350,000 potential false positive matches among California citizen voters.

The findings line up with an earlier county check. Los Angeles County's clerk reviewed a sample of 7,035 names from the list and found that about 1 in 4 of the people on it had marked the United States as their birthplace, a strong sign of citizenship.

How the list reached outside hands

The department built the list from a probe of California voter records but has not said how, Democracy Docket reported. CHIRLA's lawyers got it only after Chief Judge James E. Boasberg ordered the department on Friday to hand it over. The department had called that request a fishing expedition, the AP reported.

The Justice Department has used the list to demand that California election officials set aside the ballots of the people named on it, and it threatened election workers with prosecution if they refused. Judges have rejected that demand more than once. On Friday a federal judge in San Francisco barred the department from threatening election workers and from demanding that ballots be set aside, and the department appealed that order on Saturday. A Ninth Circuit panel also refused the department's emergency request to pull the disputed ballots.

The department defended the effort on Saturday. "Every ballot cast by an ineligible voter cancels out the vote of an American citizen," spokesperson Kiersten V. Pels said. President Donald Trump posted on social media on Saturday that the department had identified 20,000 fraudulent votes, and possibly far more, and criticized the court rulings that blocked the ballot separations. The reports reviewed carried no response to the UCLA analysis itself from Secretary of State Shirley Weber's office.

Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, and the fights over the list are still in court.