This is the first installment of a new article series at The Constitutional Compass, called “Spin vs. Reality.” In this series, recent erroneous media headlines, biased reporting or misinformation will be highlighted and corrected. The “spin” often employed by the media will be revealed, dissected and, where appropriate, refuted. This installment is about the recent efforts by the United States Government to curtail voting by non-citizens, this time in California.
Background on the Issues and the Case
As I noted in previous articles at this substack (see here, here), federal law prohibits non-citizens (including illegal and legal aliens) from registering to vote or voting. Aliens (legal or illegal) are NOT eligible to register to vote or to vote in Federal elections. 18 U.S.C. §611 specifically makes voting by “aliens” a crime.
This statute provides, in part:
“Alien,” for purposes of the criminal statute cited above, is defined in yet another federal statute, 8 U.S.C. §1101 as follows:
The current litigation referenced in this article is taking place in the State of California. Importantly, the State of California’s Constitution limits voting rights to citizens (Article II, Section 2):
Therefore, both federal and state law in California prohibit voting by non-citizens.
The Current Dispute
The full details and procedural posture of the litigation are complicated. Rather than burden readers with the esoteric details, I will briefly summarize the case.
The Trump Administration targeted illegal alien and non-citizen voting through executive action and federal law enforcement. In the process of doing so, the federal government notified state elections officials in California of some 20,000 individuals the federal government believes to be non-citizens who are, or may be, unlawfully registered to vote and requested the state’s assistance to ensure these particular people did not vote.
The California Secretary of State and the Los Angeles County Clerk refused to cooperate. The United States of America filed suit in federal court in California seeking an injunction. Thus far, the federal district court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the USA’s requested relief.
The Media’s Spin
Reporting on the court decisions denying the relief requested by the USA, media put some interesting twists (spin) on the case. In an article published on October 31, 2026, The Guardian proclaimed:
Other media outlets claim the US Department of Justice’s effort to curtail non-citizen voting in California is proof President Trump intends to “intervene” in elections:
CNN called the list of non-citizens “controversial:”
Meanwhile, media highlighted claims by California that 40% of the people on the list were born in the USA (making them citizens).
The Guardian published a similar article:
Similar stories were published by NPR and more.
Further, some of the media reports included hyperbolic claims from leftists characterizing the federal government’s efforts as “political interference,” “voter suppression” or a “sad, desperate attempt.”
Just What Did the USA Do and What Did It Request?
The USA asked California to review the list and confirm whether any citizens were listed on it and to not send to, or separate out any mail in ballots returned by, the non-citizens on the list until their citizenship could be confirmed. That is it. More details follow.
The USA purchased the California voter rolls and relevant federal agencies, including the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the United States Department of Homeland Security, compared the voter roll to federal databases to try to identify if any of the registered voters were non-citizens.
(The USA was forced to purchase the voter rolls, because federal courts refused to order California to produce the voter rolls, as unlikely as that sounds.)
The USA filed declarations of the Associate Director of Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at USCIS and the Assistant Director for Cyber and Operational Technology at the Department of Homeland Security outlining how the list of 20,000 non-citizens was derived. (Readers may access these declarations here. The declarations are attachments 3 & 4 to Document No. 22.)
The USA sent a list of over 20,000 individuals the DHS believes are (1) registered to vote in California, (2) were sent vote-by-mail ballots and (3) are non-citizen aliens.
The federal government sent the list to California elections officials and requested:
That the California elections officials review the list to determine whether any citizens are listed
For individuals who could not be confirmed to be citizens to segregate their mail in ballots from others until their citizenship status could be determined
To not mail ballots (if ballots had not yet gone out) to those individuals who could not be confirmed to be citizens until their citizenship is confirmed
The State of California refused to do any of the above.
This is what the media is crying foul about.
Why did the USA request the ballots of those individuals who could not be confirmed to be citizens to be segregated from other ballots when they were turned in? Because in California a voter is identified by the mail in ballot envelope only. Once the ballot is separate from the ballot envelope there is no way to identify the voter. As the USA stated in its Emergency Motion for Injunction Pending Appeal:
What do California elections officials do to verify the citizenship of people registering to vote? Nothing at all. California representatives conceded this at oral argument in the Ninth Circuit, as Judge Bumatay noted:
The Dissent Blows Up the Phony 40% Parroted by Media As Well
Media outlets widely touted the claim by California that 40% of the 20,000 names were born in the USA. That was based off a sample of 200 names from the list. An LA County elections representative claimed in a declaration that a “preliminary analysis of a sample of two hundred (200) records from the October list” resulted in 38.9% who were allegedly born in the USA.
While the media readily welcomed challenges to the accuracy of the list, it did not question if the 200 samples were randomly selected (the LA County witness declaration does not say). The declaration claims “among the records for which birthplace information was ‘meaningfully reported,’ 38.9% indicated they were born in the United States.” But, the declaration provides zero information to confirm what “meaningfully reported” meant.
The USA responded with a declaration of its own outlining the extensive steps it went through to review the LA County representative’s claims. The government found NONE of the individuals were born in the United States.
Notice how Judge Bumatay’s dissent deconstructs that nonsense in the portion quoted above. He wrote: “. . . the County claimed that nearly 40% of a sample of suspected noncitizens from the government’s list had been born in the United States. But when the federal government ran the sample through its systems, it confirmed none were born here.”
Go back and click the linked articles about the claims the list contained people born in the United States. You will not find any references to the USA’s investigation showing those claims were untrue or to Judge Bumatay’s statement to that effect in his dissent.
Conclusion
Many in media cannot evenhandedly report on election integrity. This case is a good illustration. It is illegal under federal law and California law for noncitizens to vote. The federal government provided California with a list of people believed to be noncitizens who are registered to vote, asked the state to help verify this and to separate out mail ballots from these people until their citizenship could be verified. California and the media falsely portray these simple requests as unreasonable, controversial attacks on the our elections and then selectively report claims against the effort without any scrutiny. That is the epitome of Spin. Now you know the truth.
Additional litigation is on-going over this voter list in at least two other cases, including a broader challenge to the Administration’s efforts to curb noncitizen voting by an immigrant-rights group involving expert analysis of part of the list. Furthermore, the true number of noncitizens registered to vote in CA is likely many times the 20,000 at issue in the current litigation. This issue is not going away.
Chances are I will write about this case again. For now, as you read any legacy media articles or watch any news reports about the case keep in mind how simple, and benign, the government’s requests were about the list and compare that to the media’s breathless reporting on it.