In mid-October, the U.S. Department of Justice delivered a letter and a password-protected thumb drive to Dean Logan, the official who runs elections for Los Angeles County. According to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the password came on a sticky note. The drive was supposed to hold the names of more than 20,000 people the federal government calls “likely noncitizens” who had been mailed ballots for the November 3 midterm election. The letter gave state and county officials 48 hours to review the names, pull aside any ballots those voters had already returned, and hold off on counting them until each person’s citizenship could be confirmed.

Logan’s office never plugged it in. County officials said opening an unknown device from an outside party would break their own data security rules, which is exactly the kind of caution you would want from the people guarding your vote. Two days later, on October 15, the Justice Department sued California, Weber, and Logan in federal court in Los Angeles.

By the next afternoon, Campaign Legal Center (CLC), Bright America’s strategic litigation partner, had filed to join the case on the side of the voters.

A list nobody can check

According to the government’s own complaint, the Department of Homeland Security took California’s voter rolls, ran the names through federal immigration databases, and flagged the people it believed were not citizens. Beyond that rough outline, the government has shared very little. It has not explained which records it used, how it matched one person’s name to another’s file, or how sure it is about any single entry, and it would not share its methods with the state and county officials it was ordering around.

That silence matters, because federal immigration records are often out of date. Someone who became a naturalized citizen years ago can still appear in an old file as a green card holder. Voting rights advocates have warned for months that matching voter rolls against these records is likely to flag naturalized Americans, the very people who worked hardest to earn the right to vote.

Jonathan Diaz, who directs voting advocacy and partnerships at CLC, told Newsweek this week that the administration has “repeatedly used unreliable data sources and questionable methods to incorrectly flag U.S. citizens” and then demanded that those eligible voters be removed from the rolls. California’s list looks like more of the same.

The numbers keep moving, too. Administration officials had earlier claimed that California had about 190,000 noncitizens on its rolls, a figure Weber dismissed as unsubstantiated. By the time the lawsuit was filed, the claim had shrunk to roughly 20,000, and NBC News has since described the list as closer to 18,000 names. Weber told the Justice Department that what it handed over was too thin to support any real investigation, and she said her office would gladly look at genuine evidence of ineligible voters if the government had any.

California already requires every voter to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen, and state law already requires officials to remove anyone found to be ineligible. Those safeguards were working long before a thumb drive showed up in Los Angeles.

In the courtroom within a day

The Justice Department filed on a Thursday. On Friday, Campaign Legal Center filed a motion to intervene, which is a formal request to join a lawsuit as one of the parties. CLC is asking to stand alongside California as a defendant, representing two clients with deep roots in the communities this list targets. One is the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the country. The other is the NAACP, along with its California/Hawaii State Conference and its Los Angeles Branch.

It is fair to ask why voters need their own lawyers when the state is already fighting the case. California’s job is to defend its election procedures. CLC’s job is to defend the people whose ballots are on the line, and to make sure a judge hears exactly how this demand would land on Latino and Black voters in Los Angeles. The filing argues that the federal government is trying to decide which voters stay on the rolls, which ballots get counted, and what voters must do to prove they are citizens, all at the last minute and all while voting is already underway.

Danielle Lang, who leads CLC’s voting rights and rule of law work, called the suit an effort “to interfere in our elections and upend settled election procedures to create chaos and confusion.” She added that CLC is joining the case so that every eligible voter can be heard in the midterms.

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A ballot in a locked box is a ballot that doesn’t count

The Justice Department insists it is not purging anyone. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, has said the government only wants the ballots set aside so a judge can decide later whether they should count. That framing deserves a closer look.

Federal law bars states from running systematic purges of their voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election. The rule exists because mistakes made in the final weeks can knock eligible people off the rolls with no time left to fix the error. Election law experts have pointed out that this lawsuit seems designed to get around that protection by going after the ballots instead of the registrations. For the voter whose ballot sits in a sealed box while the clock runs out, the difference is mostly a matter of vocabulary.

The timing raises its own questions. Los Angeles County started mailing ballots on October 1. David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney who now leads the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, asked why federal officials waited until voting had already begun to hand over their list. If accuracy were the goal, there was plenty of time last spring or summer to raise concerns through the normal process. Waiting until the eleventh hour mostly produces suspicion, the kind that can be pointed to after Election Day by anyone who doesn’t like the results.

Since the lawsuit was filed, the pressure has only grown. On October 19, federal authorities announced charges against more than two dozen people in California accused of illegally registering or voting. Trent McCotter, the Justice Department’s acting second-in-command, used a national news conference to hold up the arrests as proof that California’s rolls are corrupted and that state officials are obstructing justice. The department has also warned local election workers that knowingly processing or counting ballots from flagged voters could expose them to investigation or prosecution, which is a heavy thing to put on county staff in the middle of counting.

None of this changes what the evidence shows. Noncitizen voting is rare, hard to prove, and has never been shown to change the outcome of a race. CLC’s Diaz said on a Bloomberg Law podcast that the California suit “looks like political theater,” noting that there is no reason for the department’s second-ranking official to hold national press conferences over a small number of relatively minor alleged offenses.

A new door, after the old ones were locked

This lawsuit did not come out of nowhere. Since the spring of 2025, the Justice Department has demanded sensitive voter information from nearly every state, including partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. When about 30 states and Washington, D.C., refused, the department sued them. Federal judges have thrown those cases out again and again. By one count the department is now 0 for 26, and several of the judges who ruled against it were appointed by President Trump himself.

CLC has been in the middle of this fight from the start. It has gone to court in states across the country to keep voters’ private data out of federal hands. When the president signed an executive order in March 2025 trying to add new proof-of-citizenship hurdles to voter registration, CLC sued on behalf of LULAC and other clients and won a ruling that permanently blocked a key part of it. When a second executive order this year led to a Postal Service rule that would have thrown mail voting into disarray, CLC won an injunction in Washington, D.C., and in September the Supreme Court declined to let the rule take effect. We wrote about that win last month.

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The pattern is hard to miss. The administration tries one way to control who votes and whose votes count, a court blocks it, and a new approach appears a few weeks later. As Diaz put it on the Election Law Blog podcast this week, the administration’s efforts to reshape how our elections are run “have fallen flat at basically every opportunity.” The thumb drive is simply the latest attempt, and it may not be the last. NBC News reports the Justice Department is weighing similar suits against other states that mail ballots to every registered voter, possibly even after Election Day.

Why we back the lawyers

At Bright America, we call Campaign Legal Center our strategic litigation partner for a reason. Partisan political campaigns may get most of the headlines, but the rules that decide whether an election is free and fair are often settled in a nonpartisan courtroom, on deadlines measured in hours. When the federal government asked a judge to set aside 20,000 ballots less than three weeks before Election Day, the answer had to come fast and it had to come from people who have done this work for years. CLC had its motion on file the next day.

As of this writing, the court has not ruled, and the Justice Department has said it will ask for an emergency order. We will keep you posted. In the meantime, think about who is actually on that thumb drive. Some of them may have taken the oath of citizenship last spring, and some decades ago. Every eligible voter on that list deserves to have their ballot counted the same way as their neighbors’ ballots, and the people making sure that happens are in court right now. Supporting that work is one of the most direct ways any of us can protect this election.

20k Ballots and a Sketchy Thumb Drive