LA County Voter Case Faces Legal Crossroads After USCIS Challenges
LA County’s voter records face scrutiny as USCIS disputes citizenship claims in ballot dispute.
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On Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a major setback to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit seeking to compel Los Angeles County to segregate certain ballots until the county could establish citizenship of individuals on a list of 20,000 people identified by the federal government as likely noncitizens.
DOJ’s Appeal Dismissed on Procedural Grounds
The appellate court dismissed the DOJ’s appeal on procedural grounds, ruling that the DOJ hadn’t allowed the district court ample time to consider the request for a temporary restraining order.
While the Ninth Circuit declined to intervene, the case is far from over.
USCIS Offers New Details Challenging LA County’s Assessment
The same day that the appellate judges declined review, a senior U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) official filed a declaration in the district court offering new details that challenge key conclusions of Los Angeles County’s assessment of a 200-person sample.
Los Angeles County’s central argument was that the federal data provided were unreliable and included a significant number of voters whose records indicated they were born in the United States.
The county reported that 25.8% of the sampled voters had a place of birth in the United States listed in their records — something it characterized as a “strong indicator of citizenship status.”
USCIS Associate Director Nicolas Bartell challenged the significance of that finding in his declaration.
USCIS independently identified the 51 individuals in the sample whose California voter records indicated they were born in the U.S., matching California’s claim. However, Bartell reported that none of the individuals USCIS matched to the County’s sample were born in the United States according to USCIS records.
USCIS did not stop at simply verifying birthplace. The agency then re-reviewed each match individually to confirm that the listed voter was actually the same person represented in the USCIS records and, if so, whether USCIS records indicated that person was “likely a current alien.”
Bartell stated that USCIS found only four people who “might have a claim to U.S. citizenship.” Three of those individuals potentially derived citizenship through a parent but were not born in the United States.
However, according to the declaration, none of the four had conclusive proof of citizenship in USCIS records. Bartell cautioned that determining derivative citizenship can require a “detailed and complex legal analysis.”
LA County acknowledged that, among the 200 people in the sample, 86 had been mailed ballots, while 112 had not been sent ballots because their voter registrations were canceled or inactive.
The LA County 20,000 noncitizen voters case is about to get spicy.
The two filings ultimately present sharply differing pictures of the 200-person sample. LA County relied on California voter-registration records, which require only a simple attestation under penalty of perjury that registrants are U.S. citizens when interacting with many government agencies engaged in automatic voter registration. No documentary proof of citizenship is required.
And while California can verify a registrant’s identity through information such as DMV records, the state also issues driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, so a DMV match does not itself establish citizenship.
The USCIS declaration utilized federal immigration records to examine place of birth and then individually re-reviewed its matches to determine whether each person was the same individual reflected in the USCIS records and was “likely a current alien.” This review identified only four persons who “might have a claim to U.S. citizenship.”
Source: The Gateway Pundit
