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The Humboldt County Elections Office is refusing to comply with the Trump Administration’s demand to pull ballots for alleged noncitizens days before the midterm election. 

Earlier this week, Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters Juan Pablo Cervantes received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking voter information for “16 likely aliens” believed to be living in Humboldt County “to prevent noncitizen votes from diluting citizen votes.” The letter was first reported on by the Times-Standard.

“Interestingly, [the letter] arrived by FedEx and was then hand-delivered about an hour later by representatives of the U.S. Attorney’s Office who drove up from San Francisco,” Cervantes told the Outpost in an emailed statement. “The letter included a list of individuals the federal government believes may be ineligible to vote and asked us to investigate voters on the list, and set aside or withhold their ballots. Despite the extraordinary effort put into delivering the letter, considerably less effort appears to have gone into verifying the information it contained.”

The DOJ gave Cervantes 48 hours to provide each individual’s voter information, including their Social Security number, a copy of their state ID or driver’s license and all other documents provided during the registration process. 

“By comparing the accompanying list with the requested information you provide, together we can quickly assess these specific suspected aliens registered to vote in your County,” the letter states. “For individuals whom [sic] citizenship status cannot be confirmed, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined.”

Upon looking up the 16 names on the list, Cervantes discovered that “several names do not appear on Humboldt County’s voter rolls.” For those that do, the DOJ provided “no evidence whatsoever indicating that those individuals are ineligible to vote,” he said.

“There were also some pretty obvious issues with the quality of the information, including entries where the middle name was literally listed as ‘null’,” Cervantes continued. “As I’ve said before, allegations are not evidence, and a poorly compiled list of names is not a substitute for verifiable information.”

Cervantes said his office doesn’t plan on responding to the DOJ’s request, given that there is “nothing actionable to respond to.” He asserted that some of the demands in the letter “would be contrary to our legal obligations under state and federal election law.”

“We take the integrity of our voter rolls seriously, and if the federal government has credible evidence that someone is ineligible to vote, we absolutely want it investigated and addressed,” Cervantes said. “… We have a responsibility to ensure that only eligible voters participate in our elections, but an equally important responsibility to protect the rights of eligible voters and ensure their ballots are counted. Those responsibilities go hand in hand.”

The DOJ’s action is one of the latest efforts by the Trump Administration to undermine election integrity in states with high populations of noncitizens. The administration has subpoenaed several California election officials who’ve refused to comply with the DOJ’s order. The Humboldt County Elections Office has not received a subpoena order as of this writing. 

On Friday afternoon, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the DOJ’s request to block California from counting ballots from approximately 20,000 people the Trump Administration believes are “likely” noncitizens. In its ruling, the three-judge panel notes that the federal government failed to show that “such extraordinary relief, during an ongoing election, is clearly required by law.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta applauded the ruling, asserting that the Trump Administration’s “baseless claims of widespread fraud are an attempt to sow doubt in our democratic process and risk disenfranchising eligible voters.”

The Ninth Circuit ruling emphasizes that “California law, like federal law, plainly prohibits voting by noncitizens.”

“To that end, California has established a comprehensive statutory scheme to ensure the integrity of its elections, including by requiring voter applicants to attest to citizenship under penalty of perjury, requiring election officials to match signatures on vote-by-mail ballots to voter registration records, and establishing processes for challenging ballots and canceling registration upon sufficient showing of voter ineligibility,” the ruling continues. “… Major concerns remain that granting the United States’s requested relief might result in immense hardship to Defendants and harm the public interest by risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy.”

California has adopted several voter reforms in recent years to encourage and facilitate voter registration. An article published by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank, acknowledges that new online registration systems — especially automatic voter registration — carry “some potential for error” that could result in noncitizens voting in federal elections. Still, that doesn’t make it a common practice. The article continues:

The administration’s 20,000-person list has been culled from a larger list of 191,000 people. This much higher number—troubling if true—amounts to about 0.8% of California’s active registered voter list. Past efforts in other states to identify noncitizen voters often started with numbers in the thousands or even tens of thousands and usually ended up with counts of a few hundred at most, with almost no criminal convictions. The administration’s prosecution of 28 people from an original list of 191,000 fits with this historical pattern.

The administration has not made public the methodology behind either the list of 191,000 or the smaller one with 20,000. A parallel effort through the Census Bureau to identify noncitizen voters from 2020 may offer some insight: the matching algorithm used in that effort has an error rate many times larger than the number of noncitizen voters that were found, making each identified record more likely to be a mistake.

The article concludes by noting that noncitizen voters should be “prosecuted when appropriate.” However, the evidentiary bar for pulling voters from the rolls should be “high to avoid disenfranchising legitimate voters.”

Cervantes agreed, emphasizing that his office has “no objection to the federal government investigating allegations of ineligible voting,” but there has to be evidence. “We can’t simply disregard the law or the rights of eligible voters because someone in Washington sends us a list of names.” 

“What concerns me is that these kinds of actions create uncertainty about our elections without providing anything meaningful to address,” Cervantes continued. “We’re being asked to take extraordinary steps, some of which would violate our legal obligations, based on allegations that haven’t been substantiated. That’s not how election integrity works. Protecting our elections means both ensuring that only eligible voters participate and making sure every eligible voter has the opportunity to cast a ballot and have it counted.”

Cervantes also took issue with the fact that the federal government spent taxpayers’ dollars to drive a letter all the way up from San Francisco to hand-deliver it. He said he’d rather see those resources go toward supporting the public servants who administer local elections.

“Our elections are administered locally, by your neighbors, public servants who live and work in the same communities they serve,” he added. “We take that responsibility seriously, and our commitment remains the same: ensuring every eligible voter has the opportunity to participate, every lawful vote is counted, and the process remains secure, accessible, and transparent.”

Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. If you haven’t received your ballot or have any questions at all about the election, contact the Humboldt County Elections Office at 707-445-7481.

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The Redheaded Blackbelt obtained a copy of the DOJ’s letter. It can be read in full here.