California calls Trump’s election voting claims ‘absurd’

California’s top attorney called on a federal judge to block the Trump administration’s efforts to force the state to set aside up to 20,000 ballots that prosecutors claim could have been mailed to noncitizens.

In a court filing Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles, Attorney General Rob Bonta said the lawsuit the Trump administration filed last week “borders on the absurd.” 

“At best, this litigation is a reckless political stunt,” Bonta’s filing reads. “At worst, it threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians this election.”

Bonta’s filing came a day after federal prosecutors announced they’d charged 28 California green card holders for allegedly voting or registering to vote in violation of laws prohibiting noncitizens from participating in elections. In his filing, Bonta noted the arrests represent just .0001 percent of the 23 million registered voters in California.

In announcing those charges Monday, federal authorities said they also asked a judge to issue a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that would force the state to segregate the 20,000 ballots. Bonta is urging the court not to issue the order.

The case has profound implications across the country with the midterm elections two weeks away. The U.S. Constitution gives states primary authority to independently conduct their elections. The Trump administration is testing whether it has the legal right to pause a state’s vote counts based on a list of possible noncitizen voters that federal officials acknowledge may be inaccurate.

In his filing Tuesday, Bonta said the Trump administration has lost 26 different lawsuits as it sought unredacted voter rolls from states in its hunt for evidence to support President Donald Trump’s unfounded voter fraud claims.

“The government has lobbed allegations of widespread voter fraud at the states, only for those allegations to crumble under scrutiny,” Bonta wrote. “As one court recently noted, the federal government’s citizenship records are ‘known to be unreliable.’”

The Department of Homeland Security recently claimed that Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls. DHS sent the state the names of only 185 voters. Nevada officials confirmed they were all U.S. citizens. Similarly, in Pennsylvania, DHS alleged the state had more than 14,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls, but prosecutors have only charged nine with illegally voting. 

Acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General Trent McCotter said Monday that the 20,000 possible noncitizen voters in California were enough “to fill a small stadium,” but he acknowledged that number could be an overcount. 

“There may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens,” McCotter said. “We’re not perfect, and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us.”

McCotter said its list of possible noncitizens was based on public voter rolls the federal government obtained from California, which it then cross-referenced with “other government databases, other public information.”

McCotter said all 28 defendants charged Monday are on the list of 20,000 names, a number that he said was “just the floor” and likely to grow.

Officials skeptical of federal methodology

State officials and independent election experts have been skeptical of the Trump team’s methodology after federal authorities notified state officials in July that there could be as many as 190,000 noncitizen voters in California. 

In Bonta’s filing, he noted that the California secretary of state had asked for a detailed accounting of how the federal government came up with that figure, but the Trump administration would not put it in writing. Instead, federal authorities proposed a virtual meeting, which state officials declined. 

“To date, DHS has not provided evidence, documentation, or any other information to the Secretary’s Office in support of its assertions that there ‘may be’ noncitizens registered to vote in California,” Bonta wrote. 

“If they wanted to cooperate, they have our number,” McCotter told reporters Monday. “They know who to contact. … There’s clearly just no motivation on their part.”

Bonta noted in his filing that state officials have been complying with federal grand jury subpoenas seeking information on about 300 people that federal prosecutors are investigating.

On Oct. 13, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to Secretary of State Shirley Weber informing her it had sent a thumb drive to Los Angeles County election officials containing “a list of names the federal government believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a … ballot,” according to Bonta’s filing.

“DOJ demanded that Secretary Weber ‘review the list within 48 hours to determine whether any citizens are listed,’” and, for anyone whose citizenship the state couldn’t confirm, to set aside their ballots or stop ballots from being mailed to them.

Weber refused, telling the federal government that voting was well underway, Bonta wrote.

The federal government sued California two days later. 

In its lawsuit filed last week, the justice department said it is “not practicable or feasible” for the federal government to dig deeper into the thousands of names it had flagged as possible noncitizens before the 2026 election concludes, despite wanting California to do that in the middle of an election.

In declarations filed with the court Tuesday, Los Angeles County election officials said they’ve done a preliminary analysis of a sampling of 200 of voters from the federal government’s thumb drive. They said that many of the names on the list appear to be citizens, and that most had not voted and were not sent ballots.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit whose mission is to restore trust in the American election system, told reporters last week he expects California will prevail in the suit.

“I expect the courts are not going to respond favorably to the DOJ acting with such a lack of diligence in this case, and apparently almost seeming to try to set California up,” said Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney. “If they had been honest with California back in July, and had an honest belief that the number of citizens/noncitizens on the voter list were as they claim, they could have been transparent and shared that data. But they didn’t.”

Did immigrants know they committed a crime?

Meanwhile, some of the 28 green card holders who were arrested Monday in the voter fraud sting told reporters that they didn’t know they had done anything illegal; others said they had no idea they had registered to vote. 

Prosecutors alleged that 22 suspects voted in at least one election including as recently as the June primary; five only registered to vote and one submitted a provisional ballot in 2020.

Kamlesh Shah, a 68-year-old immigrant from India, told The Sacramento Bee in an interview that he voted in 2024 for Vice President Kamala Harris, but he thought he was allowed to since he had applied for citizenship after living in the country for three decades.

He visited a Sacramento County polling place and handed over his identification. An election worker gave him the OK and a ballot, Shah told the Bee.

“I can hardly walk and talk,” Shah told the Bee Monday at his Sacramento senior living facility. “Now I have to face these charges.”

Ana Domínguez, 60, a native of El Salvador living in Long Beach, said she didn’t remember registering to vote, The Los Angeles Times reported Monday. She’s accused of registering to vote in 2006 and then lying about it 20 years later on her immigration paperwork. 

Election experts say that such stories are common in voter fraud cases.

“We know from past experience that sometimes people register to vote accidentally, as when there is a mistake at the DMV,” Rick Hasen, a UCLA School of Law professor, said Monday in a blog post. “There is only a crime if the government can prove willful violations of federal law.”

Hasen wrote that it was telling how few were charged on Monday, despite Trump and his allies spending years aggressively hunting for evidence of a massive election fraud conspiracy that they have not proved exists.

“If DOJ could prove many more cases, we would have heard about it,” he wrote. “They’ve been on an aggressive hunt nationally for such fraud. It’s not surprising they’ve found little because it is a small problem.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday said on social media that “any credible allegation of voter fraud should be taken seriously and investigated,” but he questioned the timing.

“If the feds were serious about this, they would have done this long ago — not in the middle of people voting, which inherently and needlessly sows distrust and doubt in our democracy,” he wrote.