Shortly after making an address to the nation alleging widespread voter security breaches and election interference by China Thursday, President Donald Trump said his administration has notified California that it is one of four states with more than 250,000 non-citizens registered to vote collectively between them.
“State election officials in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada have been notified of this serious threat to national security and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) stands ready to support their efforts to identify and remove ineligible registrants,” according to a Department of Homeland Security document released Thursday night after Trump’s speech.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded on X that “We have no idea where this latest claim comes from. The Federal Government sued (and lost) to get access to the state’s voter rolls. And if they already had them, why sue in the first place?”
Newsom was referring to a Department of Justice lawsuit against California and five other states seeking sensitive voter information. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in January.
Newsom continued: “California law is clear: You MUST be a U.S. citizen to vote in state and federal elections. Voter fraud is EXTREMELY RARE — and almost always committed by U.S. citizens. Donald Trump’s Administration has repeatedly pushed false and misleading claims about elections. They have provided NO evidence to support these new ‘claims.’ Why should anyone believe them now?”
Congress passed a law in 1996 prohibiting noncitizens from voting in federal elections, but California, Maryland, Vermont and Washington, DC allow noncitizens to cast ballots in some local elections.
In 2016, San Francisco voters authorized noncitizen parents or guardians of students who live in the San Francisco Unified School District to vote in school board elections. Oakland voters followed suit in 2022. A Superior Court judge initially overturned San Francisco’s law, but the state’s First District Court of Appeal rejected the determination that it was unconstitutional and reinstated the measure, allowing Oakland’s law to continue also. The conservative group that had challenged the law said it would not further challenge the law.
It is not clear whether DHS was referring to noncitizen voters who might be eligible to vote in certain local elections, but it claimed the noncitizens it identified were “registered to vote in federal elections.” The Oakland and San Francisco measures do not allow voting by noncitizens in state or federal races.
A 2021 assessment of the 2020 election by the Intelligence community found with “high confidence” that China considered but did not go through with an operation to sway the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The person who oversaw that report was John Ratcliffe, Trump’s director of national intelligence in his first term. He is now director of the CIA.
Trump’s speech was filled with inaccurate and misleading claims. Among them was when he said that over a period of years, starting with the 2020 election cycle, “China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities.”
Voter roll information is publicly available to anyone — including people in China. It can be obtained through public records requests, or can be purchased from a state. Trump didn’t say how China obtained the information illegally.
Both Newsom and California Sen. Alex Padilla said Trump’s speech was an alarming indication he plans to interfere in the midterm elections.
“Clearly, this is no longer about an election Donald Trump lost six years ago,” said Padilla, who administered California’s 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in his role as secretary of state. “It’s about him laying the groundwork to try to ‘take over the voting’ in the upcoming midterm elections.”