The password came on a sticky note, California's secretary of state's office says. Los Angeles County never used it. County officials declined to open the password-protected thumb drive federal officials delivered, citing data-privacy and security concerns, Newsweek reported. On that drive were more than 20,000 names the federal government says belong to likely noncitizens who were mailed ballots for the Nov. 3 election.

Now the Justice Department has moved from a lawsuit to a warning about prosecution. In a letter Friday first obtained by the Associated Press, Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told the Los Angeles County Counsel's office, with copies to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and County Registrar Dean Logan: “If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

“The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring a federal crime are significant,” the letter adds. The AP reported that any federal criminal case in the Los Angeles area would run through the office of Bill Essayli, the region's top federal prosecutor and one of the officials who filed the lawsuit. Weber's office, the registrar and the state attorney general did not immediately respond to the AP.

What the lawsuit wants

The suit, filed Thursday with help from the Department of Homeland Security, rests on the department's claim that more than 20,000 people who are likely aliens are registered to vote in California, where state law sends a ballot to every registered voter. The complaint asks a federal judge to make California set aside mail ballots from the people Washington flagged and verify their citizenship, “beyond relying on unverified statements of citizenship necessary to registering,” before any of those ballots are counted.

“California election officials were given an opportunity to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls and to sequester ballots returned from suspected ineligible voters. They refused,” Essayli said in the department's announcement. Attorney General Todd Blanche called it “state-facilitated voter fraud,” while adding a qualifier worth noticing: “If found responsible in a court of law.”

Sacramento's answer: Show your work

Weber, a Democrat, refused before the suit was even filed. “I will not disenfranchise thousands of Californians—or order any county elections official to do so—based solely upon an unsupported and likely inaccurate ‘belie[f]’ that certain voters are ‘likely’ noncitizens,” she wrote to McCotter, in a letter quoted by Democracy Docket. Setting voted ballots aside, she argued, would be “an unprecedented suspension—and even denial—of voting rights.”

Her core complaint is about evidence. Weber said Homeland Security never gave her the data or method behind its earlier claim that more than 190,000 California registrants “may be” noncitizens, and that the new list lacks “both the detail and function to be of any investigative use,” Newsweek reported. She also argued the demand may conflict with an Oct. 9 federal court order that vacated a Justice Department policy on comparing state voter rolls against federal databases.

A number that keeps shrinking

So 190,000 became 20,000. Washington has been down this road before, too. In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote to California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania alleging as many as 250,000 noncitizens were registered in those states. The administration said Nevada alone had 1,500 noncitizens on its rolls. Once the names went to the state, the count of actual registered noncitizens turned out to be zero, according to the AP.

Real cases do exist. The Justice Department has charged about 90 people with election misconduct this year, including 50 accused of voting as noncitizens, the AP reported. Each of them is presumed innocent until a court says otherwise.

Both governments owe voters something here. If even a slice of those 20,000 names are noncitizens holding live ballots, California's habit of mailing a ballot to everyone on a roll it doesn't verify is the very weakness critics have warned about for years, and the state's refusal to hold those ballots while the names are checked will be hard to defend. But a federal government that threatens local ballot counters with prosecution less than three weeks before an election should be ready to explain, in open court, how it built its list. After Nevada, “trust us” doesn't cut it from either side.

Why Indiana isn't in California's shoes

Indiana doesn't mail a ballot to every registered voter. Voting by mail here takes a qualifying reason, such as being 65 or older, having a disability, or being out of your county for the whole time the polls are open, under the secretary of state's absentee rules.

Indiana also checks earlier. Laws passed in 2024 and 2025 require anyone who registers using a temporary BMV credential, which typically goes to legal immigrants who aren't citizens, to prove citizenship within 30 days of being notified or lose the registration, The Indiana Citizen has reported. By June, counties had rejected 644 applications and canceled 981 existing registrations under that process, while 977 people proved they were citizens, the Indiana Capital Chronicle found. Those totals include people who never answered the notice, including some whose mail came back undeliverable.

Secretary of State Diego Morales's office has also run 488,030 registrations through the federal SAVE citizenship database, which flagged 165 people as potential noncitizens, according to The Indiana Citizen. That's about three flags for every 10,000 registrations checked, and a flag isn't a finding. On Sept. 25 the U.S. Supreme Court let states keep using the expanded SAVE system, after Attorney General Todd Rokita joined Florida, Iowa and Ohio in a brief backing the administration. Privacy groups call the system error-prone, and their lawsuit continues.

The stakes in California reach well past Sacramento. The state has more than 23 million registered voters, and a handful of close House races there could decide which party controls the chamber for the last two years of President Trump's term, the AP noted. Whatever a judge does with the thumb drive, Hoosiers pick the next secretary of state, Indiana's chief election officer, on the same Nov. 3 ballot.

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.