The Trump administration is at it again, threatening to take legal action against California election officials if they don’t review a list of alleged noncitizens on Los Angeles’ voter rolls within 48 hours. I mean, folks, I almost spilled my coffee reading this one. According to Tuesday letters from the Justice Department obtained by CNN, the administration is demanding that election officials refuse to send ballots to the alleged noncitizen voters and segregate ballots from voters on the list until their citizenship is confirmed. Bless their hearts, it seems like they’re trying to stir up some controversy just in time for the election.
The letters, signed by the number two official at the Justice Department, are an escalation in DOJ’s attempts to press for aggressive voter purges with ballots already mailed out in some states. It’s the latest step in a government-wide push to find voter fraud amid President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread cheating in elections. You can’t make this stuff up, right? The Justice Department is demanding that election officials take immediate action, or else they’ll “have no choice but to seek emergency relief.” Somewhere in Atlanta, a producer thought this sounded terrifying, I’m sure.
Acting deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter wrote in the letters to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder and the California Secretary of State that the department provided a password-protected thumb drive containing names the administration “believes are likely non-citizens” who were sent a mail ballot this year. The administration claims there are hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls, but those claims have come under immense scrutiny and, in some cases, failed to hold up. In Nevada, for instance, DHS acknowledged that its initial claim of 15,900 non-citizen registrants was an unvetted preliminary finding, and that it had only “confirmed” 185 of them through manual review.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has also sought unredacted state voter roll data from the states as part of its hunt for noncitizens on the rolls. The department has sued 30 states demanding the data — but lost every case where a judge has ruled so far, including in California. Other attempts by the administration to police how states handle elections have also been shut down in court. The Supreme Court blocked a Trump directive for the US Postal Service to screen mail ballots, and a 2025 executive order from the president seeking to boost the proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration was halted in court as well.
As I finish my coffee and wrap up this article, I have to say that it’s been a wild ride. The Trump administration’s efforts to implement voter ID laws and purge voter rolls have been met with resistance from states and courts alike. And let’s be real, it’s not like they’re trying to sneak this in under the radar – they’re making a big show of it, complete with dramatic language and threats of legal action. But hey, at least it’s entertaining, right? In the end, it’s just another day in the world of politics, where the drama never ends and the coffee is always hot.
Armchair patriot. Believes in the free market, cold beer, and that there’s always a guy named George behind every CNN segment.
Former remote-throwing champion turned #1 couch commentator on liberal panic in the media. Born in Texas (or so his mug says), he earned a degree in Fake Newsology & Beer Philosophy from YouTube University.
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