Researchers who examined the Justice Department’s list of alleged noncitizen voters in California found that 8,880 of its 20,930 names, about 42 percent, do not match anyone in the state’s current voter file, according to a court filing made public on Saturday.
Two data analysts from the University of California, Los Angeles Voting Rights Project carried out the review for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, known as CHIRLA, which is challenging the federal government’s voter-enforcement campaign in court.
Saturday’s filing matters because it is the first outside analysis of a list the Justice Department has used to demand that California election officials set aside ballots and to threaten prosecution of officials who refuse.
California officials and several judges have already described the list as unreliable, and the new figures give the first detailed measure of how far its names diverge from the state’s own voter records.
Analysts Matt Barreto and Michael Rios compared the federal names, dates of birth and addresses with California’s voter file and citizenship records, according to reports of the filing from the Associated Press and other outlets.
They found at least 22 exact matches to people whose naturalization records confirm they are United States citizens, and 66 more people they described as highly likely to be citizens based on near-exact matches.
Researchers also estimated that nearly 7,500 naturalized citizens were highly likely to have been incorrectly flagged as ineligible, although that estimate rests on matching methods the government disputes.
California’s own review, cited in earlier court proceedings, found that about one in four people on the federal list were born in the United States, a fact that generally indicates citizenship but does not by itself settle every individual case.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs received the underlying list only after Chief Judge James Boasberg ordered the government on Friday to disclose it to them, over the department’s objection that the request was a fishing expedition.
Analysts said the list as handed over lacked a state voter-identification number for each entry, contained duplicates and included incomplete or inconsistent data, making one-to-one verification more difficult.
An unmatched name does not by itself prove that a person is a citizen, or that the person never voted, and the filing does not claim that every name on the federal list is wrong.
Voter files can be incomplete, and cancelled or inactive registrations are not the same as active illegal voting, a distinction both sides in the dispute have acknowledged in different ways.
Justice Department officials have defended the list as a preliminary review that identified people it described as likely noncitizens, not conclusively proven ones, and have framed ballot segregation as a temporary safeguard while eligibility is checked.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has said the government would not apologize for protecting citizens’ votes, arguing that every ineligible ballot dilutes a lawful one, according to Associated Press reporting.
California refused the department’s demand to separate the disputed ballots, and the Justice Department sued the state on October 15 after sending it the list on October 12, barely three weeks before the election.
Multiple judges have since rejected the demand, and the Ninth Circuit has twice turned away emergency bids to force California to set the ballots aside while the underlying lawsuit continues.
On Friday, a separate federal judge ordered the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to stop threatening election officials with prosecution over ballot processing, a ruling the administration appealed on Saturday.
What remains unresolved is how many of the 8,880 unmatched names belong to people who were never registered, whose records have changed, or whose details simply failed to match, and how the Justice Department will answer the analysis in court.
California voters go to the polls on Tuesday, November 3, in midterm elections that will decide control of Congress, and state officials have said ballots already cast will be counted under normal procedures while the legal fight continues.
