WASHINGTON — Los Angeles election workers were told in writing on Friday that counting certain ballots could make them accomplices to a federal crime, as the Justice Department turned a dispute over California’s voter rolls into a threat of prosecution.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter made the warning in a letter to Los Angeles officials, according to ABC News, extending the DOJ California noncitizen ballots fight that began earlier this week with a thumb drive and a two-day deadline. “If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime,” he wrote.
On Thursday the department sued, asking a federal court to bar California from “presently tabulating vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens” until each voter’s citizenship is determined, CBS News reported. The suit says the federal government identified more than 20,000 such registrations, a figure the department drew from names compiled by the Department of Homeland Security.
What changed Friday is who carries the risk. McCotter wrote: “The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring a federal crime are significant.” The threat now reaches the election workers who tabulate ballots, not only the state, ABC News reported. President Donald Trump reposted the letter and wrote in a follow-up post that “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”
The list behind the threat remains unseen. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber has said the Justice Department had not provided the list of names, CBS reported.
She also said the department’s “relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data” “serve only to cause chaos,” in a statement ABC carried.
The department’s record in court gives her an argument. Its Civil Rights Division has filed 31 lawsuits to force states to hand over unredacted voter rolls, has lost 26 of them and has not won one, CBS News reported. Nor is this the first such warning. Over the summer, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened election officials with prison, ABC noted, saying they “can be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even depending on how far it goes, prison time.”
ABC wrote that experts overwhelmingly agree the lawsuit is unlikely to succeed. Sean Morales Doyle of the Brennan Center said the administration appears to be “laying the groundwork” to challenge results after Election Day.
Whether any prosecutor would test McCotter’s theory on a worker who counted a ballot from one of those names is a question the letter leaves open, and neither report says how many such ballots Los Angeles County holds.
