Noncitizen Voter List: LA County Sample Finds U.S.-Born

Los Angeles County says a sample of the Justice Department’s noncitizen voter list turned up people who reported being born in the United States, canceled registrations and voters who have never cast a ballot.

Los Angeles County election officials told a federal court on Oct. 20 that the Justice Department’s noncitizen voter list is unreliable, after a review of 200 flagged records found that 38.9% of those with a usable birthplace listed the United States. The sworn declarations, filed to oppose the department’s emergency bid to stop California from counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 voters it calls likely noncitizens, put concrete numbers on how well the federal records match performs.

The timing is what makes the filing matter. The Nov. 3 midterm is less than two weeks away, ballots are already coming back, and a judge in United States v. California must decide whether to order officials to set aside votes based on a list one defendant now calls unreliable. The case, filed Oct. 15 against the state, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan, was built on a single Supremacy Clause claim.

Most of the list does not even involve Los Angeles. Of the more than 20,000 records, 7,035 carry Los Angeles County addresses, according to a declaration from Aman Bhullar, an assistant registrar who runs the county’s information technology bureau. Monica Flores, the assistant registrar over voter services, described what staff found in a sample of 200 of those records.

Finding in the 200-record sample	Result
Records with a usable birthplace that listed the United States	38.9%
Registrations canceled or inactive, so no general election ballot was mailed	112 of 200
Records with no voting history	71.2%

Source: Declarations of Monica Flores and Aman Bhullar, Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, filed Oct. 20, 2026, in United States v. California, No. 2:26-cv-12025 (C.D. Cal.). Preliminary figures; the county did not say how the sample was drawn or how many records had a birthplace.

“The review is preliminary and quality control is continuing, but it indicates that the October List is unreliable,” Flores wrote. NPR, which reported the filings along with ABC News, noted that it is unclear how many of the 200 records included a birthplace, so the 38.9% figure rests on an unknown base. California’s online registration form asks for place of birth but does not require it, NPR reported.

Why a U.S. birthplace on the noncitizen voter list is a red flag

The department’s complaint says USCIS bought California’s voter file and ran it against agency records with third-party software, then checked for naturalization, derived citizenship, State Department records and death records before a second review. That design was meant to screen out naturalized and derived citizens. A person born in the United States, though, is a citizen at birth and would ordinarily have no immigration file at all. When such a person lands on the list, the likely explanations are a name-based match to someone else’s file or a wrong birthplace in the registration record. Either one points to a matching problem rather than a voter who lied about citizenship.

The canceled and inactive records cut another way. If 112 of 200 sampled voters were never mailed a ballot, the list’s reach over this election is narrower than 20,000, and much of it rests on stale data. That also means the sample says less about the voters who did receive ballots.

The Justice Department has not claimed the list is error-free. “There may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens,” Trent McCotter, a senior department official, told reporters on Oct. 19, according to both outlets, adding that the department had asked California to cooperate. Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels said “California cannot facilitate the violation of federal law.” California’s own filing called the suit “a reckless political stunt” that “threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians,” NPR reported.

What the judge has to weigh before Nov. 3

To win a temporary restraining order, the department must show it is likely to succeed and that the balance of harms favors stopping the count. The county’s numbers go straight to that balance: a court asked to set aside ballots will want to know how many of the people affected are citizens. The government’s best answer is that it seeks only to pause counting until citizenship is confirmed, using its highest-confidence matches. The weak point is that no one has said who would confirm citizenship, or how fast, while California counts mail ballots for days after Election Day.

Scale matters too. California had 23,164,977 registered voters as of Sept. 4, according to the Secretary of State, so the federal list covers less than one-tenth of one percent of them, a calculation from those figures. The criminal side runs separately: prosecutors charged 28 green card holders in California on Oct. 19, and the department says thousands more cases are under review. Earlier, it warned Los Angeles officials they could face prosecution for counting flagged ballots.

If the county’s sample holds up, a missing or mistyped birthplace, or a name shared with someone in USCIS records, can be enough to put a citizen on a federal list. How the court weighs that evidence will shape whether similar lists are used against other states’ voters.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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