The San Diego County Registrar of Voters told the U.S. Justice Department that it won’t comply with a demand — accompanied by a legal threat — to turn over private voter information like Social Security numbers and to not count ballots from 1,709 San Diego voters until their citizenship can be verified.
In a defiant letter Tuesday, the county said it is “legally prohibited” from doing so. And it offered a legal threat of its own: “The County reserves its rights to pursue all legal remedies against DOJ for its unlawful intimidation of election officials and California voters.”
The letter from County Counsel Damon Brown to California Southern District U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon said, “The DOJ’s request is a thinly veiled voter purge and request for confidential voter information without a proper purpose.”
The San Diego County Registrar of Voters Office received Gordon’s demand letter Friday with a 48-hour deadline and a warning that “the legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring federal crimes are significant.”
Every county in California received a similar letter.
San Diego County’s deadline lapsed Sunday. The response, obtained by inewsource, went out Tuesday evening.
The county said the federal government’s request was an “invitation to violate both state and federal law based on nothing more than unsubstantiated suspicions regarding a person’s citizenship.”
The county also said the requested actions “would be a breach of voters’ trust of the highest order.”
The letter said that a spot check of a random 10% of the names on the U.S. government’s list “reveals significant reasons to doubt the reliability of that list.” It said 59% of some 170 voters had canceled voter registrations and 74% have no record of voting in San Diego County.
That sample adds to mounting criticism of a list that includes about 20,000 California voters.
The Los Angeles County Registrar also found significant issues in a sample of 200 names, saying 71% had never voted and over half had inactive or canceled voter registrations. Thirty-eight percent had been born in the U.S., suggesting they were citizens.
Last week, a federal judge ordered Department of Homeland Security officials to halt field operations underway in nine states focused on potential voter fraud, finding it relied on flawed and incomplete data that is widely known to include U.S. citizens. The judge said the operations could be intimidating voters and voter outreach groups with early voting under way.
The DOJ had previously filed five subpoenas for 25 individual voter records, and the registrar had said it complied with the request as legally required. That culminated in four individuals being charged for voting related crimes in San Diego County and in Gordon’s letter last week.
The county’s letter in response states that the request for confidential voter information without a court order or a confidentiality agreement is prohibited under California law.
“The fact that your letter requests confidential voter information in order to confirm DOJ’s unsubstantiated allegations against County residents is further proof that the list of 1,709 individuals is just that — unsubstantiated,” Brown wrote. “DOJ certainly knows how to obtain a judicial warrant and could have done so if it had a sufficient evidentiary basis for the allegations in the letter,”
Brown also noted that it is the California Secretary of State, not the San Diego County Registrar of Voters that is responsible for verifying voter eligibility.
U.S. Central District of California Judge David O. Carter is expected to rule Wednesday on a lawsuit by the DOJ over whether it can compel the secretary of state to comply with the same demands.
ABC News reported that in a hearing on Tuesday, Judge Carter said “this court believes it would be wise that any threats to state and county elected employees cease immediately,” and that he is considering appointing a special master to evaluate the DOJ’s allegations.
The letter the county sent back to the DOJ doesn’t take the threats lightly.
“We consider DOJ’s efforts to threaten California election officials with criminal sanctions for following federal and state law to be an effort to unlawfully intimidate both election officials and California voters.”
The county ended its letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office saying the Registrar of Voters Office, which has repeatedly said local elections will proceed as normal, “will continue to comply with federal and state laws while it conducts free and fair elections in this county.”
