The DOJ Charged 28 Noncitizens in California — All Green-Card Holders, a Number Who Don't Appear to Have Voted
The Justice Department announced on Monday that it was charging 28 noncitizens with election crimes in California — an escalation over the state's voting system that NPR reports looks set to continue through Election Day and beyond. According to DOJ officials, all 28 are green-card holders, and all of them appeared on the list of 20,000 names the department gave California officials the previous week.
A number of them do not appear to have actually voted, and some registered to vote more than 20 years ago. California has asked for specific information on how the federal government came to its conclusions, and has not received it, NPR reports.
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Officials put it at 113 people charged across 20 states in seven weeks, which on its face is a small number — close to UCLA's Hasen's reading that the charges are meant to make noncitizen voting look like a bigger issue than it is.
Rare isn't never. The reporting notes that noncitizen voting has never been found to be a widespread problem in American elections while the administration is devoting significant resources to uncovering the ineligible voting that does occur. If a register contains errors, someone has to clean them; the real argument is how to do that without treating every discrepancy as intent.
New Jersey already showed what an intent-free mess looks like: a DMV software glitch registered more than 6,000 people to vote even though they had indicated they were noncitizens. Past research says bureaucratic error, not intentional fraud, is often the explanation when noncitizen registration happens — which is why the intent question is the one worth arguing about.