A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The Trump administration is escalating its search for noncitizen voters.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Yeah. On Tuesday, three weeks before Election Day, the Justice Department delivered a flash drive to the top voting official in Los Angeles County. That official was told he had 48 hours to investigate names listed on that drive or he would be sued.
MARTÍNEZ: Yesterday, the DOJ followed through and filed suit against LA County and the state of California. NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks joins us now to discuss this. So, Miles, since the DOJ suit, I'm guessing Los Angeles did not respond well to that demand.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Right. So this thumb drive included the names of 20,000 people that the federal government believes are likely noncitizens and on the voter rolls in California. But LA County did not consider this drive to be a secure medium for this sort of information. I mean, the password for the drive was literally included on a Post-it note with the delivery of it. And the clerk there, Dean Logan, noted that. Also, he told the DOJ he felt the process that they were asking for would actually break numerous other laws that govern how elections run, including restrictions on voter purges this close to Election Day.
And more broadly, California - as well as many election experts - have just expressed a lot of skepticism of the administration's noncitizen voting claims, not only because of President Trump's history of lying in this realm. But also the data analysis that seems to have been used to come up with this list - matching incomplete voter data with imperfect immigration data - it's been shown to generate a lot of false positives.
MARTÍNEZ: Seems. You said seems. Now, has the federal government actually explained where these numbers come from?
PARKS: No. And Shirley Weber, who's the Democratic secretary of state of California, noted that in her response to the DOJ, saying that she was not going to disenfranchise thousands of people in her state based solely on, quote, "unsupported and likely inaccurate" accusations.
MARTÍNEZ: Miles, how far back does this effort from the administration go?
PARKS: I mean, in some ways, it goes back a decade to President Trump claiming in 2016 that California's voter rolls were full of noncitizens. But this specific saga started this summer. You might remember President Trump made this big primetime speech in July on election integrity. And as part of that, his administration claimed that it had found hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls of just four states.
Now, those numbers have already been proven to be vastly overstated. And there's never been evidence to support this idea that noncitizens vote in anything but tiny numbers in American elections. But California was one of the states that the administration called out, and this list seems to have been generated from that same effort.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. So California didn't go along with the DOJ's request, which is where this lawsuit comes in. What is the DOJ asking a federal judge to do now?
PARKS: So vote-by-mail ballots have already gone out in California for this year's general election. So the DOJ wants to make sure those ballots that are associated with this list of people are segregated for investigation - that they don't get counted. In the lawsuit, the DOJ says it seeks this relief to prevent unlawful dilution of American citizens' votes and to protect the integrity of our elections.
MARTÍNEZ: So what are the chances the DOJ will be successful with this?
PARKS: It would be surprising. The Constitution very clearly says states run elections. And this DOJ has lost a historic number of cases the last two years trying to encroach on that. For instance, they've tried to force states to hand over nonpublic versions of their voter rolls and lost 26 out of 26 cases where there's been a decision on that issue.
Rick Hasen, a law professor who runs UCLA's Safeguarding Democracy Project, wrote online yesterday that he expects this California lawsuit to, quote, "go nowhere," and that it was more likely a political strategy to cast doubt on the midterm results.
MARTÍNEZ: That's NPR's Miles Parks. Miles, thanks.
PARKS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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