WASHINGTON, D.C. – Elias Law Group has filed a motion to intervene on behalf of two nonprofit organizations, Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network (SIREN) and Mi Familia en Acción, in the U.S. Department of Justice’s new lawsuit in which DOJ seeks to interfere in the ongoing election by blocking California from counting the mail ballots of more than 20,000 registered voters.
President Trump’s DOJ sued California on Thursday, 48 hours after sending local election officials a thumb drive that DOJ claimed contained a list of registered voters that it believes are “likely noncitizens.” The list is unverified and DOJ did not respond to questions from California officials about how it complied the list or the methodology that DOJ used to identify the targeted voters. In its lawsuit, DOJ asks the court to order California to set aside mail ballots from voters on the list and refuse to count them until their citizenship status is “verified.”
In the motion to intervene on behalf of SIREN and Mi Familia en Acción, Elias Law Group attorneys explain that there is no legal basis for the DOJ’s demand, which arrives well inside the 90-day window before a federal election when the National Voter Registration Act bars systematic removal of voters from the rolls. The motion argues that the DOJ’s lawsuit is a clear violation of that protection, which Congress adopted because last-minute voter purges based on flawed data are likely to disenfranchise eligible citizens who have no time to correct the record and restore their ability to vote.
The motion also notes that there is strong reason to believe that the list DOJ provided to California consists of citizens. This has been a pattern as the Trump Administration has repeatedly claimed to have identified significant numbers of noncitizens on states’ voter rolls, only to have those claims fall apart on closer scrutiny. For example, earlier this year, the federal government told Nevada it may have nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its rolls, before cutting that figure to 185, all of whom state officials confirmed were citizens. In California, the Trump administration’s own estimate has already fallen from more than 190,000 in July to roughly 20,000 today. The DOJ has not produced any underlying data or answered questions about how the list was generated.
“With ballots already in voters’ hands, President Trump’s Department of Justice is asking a federal court to throw out the votes of thousands of Californians based on a secret list it delivered on a thumb drive and gave officials 48 hours to review,” said Elias Law Group partner Uzoma Nkwonta. “No federal law allows the Department of Justice to decide whose ballot counts, and in fact federal law expressly forbids this kind of eleventh-hour systematic purge. We are proud to stand with SIREN and Mi Familia en Acción to make sure eligible voters are not silenced in this election.”
The motion to intervene is available here.
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