Napa Registrar Refuses Trump Demands To Verify Voters

NAPA COUNTY, CA — Napa County Registrar of Voters John Tuteur will not respond to a U.S. Department of Justice demand to verify the citizenship of 42 potential voters, he said Tuesday.

The government gave Tuteur 48 hours to tell the government if the county would comply or not.

Tuteur said Tuesday by phone that he has taken no action and does not plan to respond.

Napa was among the California counties that received similar demands.

In an Oct. 24 letter to county elections officials, the California Secretary of State’s office warned that withholding ballots based solely on unsupported suspicions about voters’ citizenship would violate federal and state election laws.

The federal letters demanded that counties commit within 48 hours to separate certain voters’ ballots and stop processing them pending citizenship verification, according to the state’s letter. They also sought nonpublic registration information, including Social Security numbers and copies of identification documents.

The Secretary of State’s office urged county officials to consult their county counsel before disclosing that information.

Two uniformed Department of Homeland Security officers delivered Napa’s letter late Friday afternoon, Tuteur told The Associated Press. It listed 42 people the federal government accused of being noncitizens illegally registered to vote.

Napa County has roughly 86,000 registered voters and more than 130,000 residents, Tuteur said. Approximately 11,000 of those residents had already cast mail-in ballots as of Friday.

Los Angeles County had counted more than 331,000 mail-in votes.

Voter intimidation is “another big reason” the department sent the letters.

But Tuteur told the AP that his employees and relatives feared what might happen next.

“My family’s upset, worried about what’s going to happen to me,” he said.

Los Angeles County received the same demand on Oct. 13, 10 days before Napa.

L.A. County counsel responded Oct. 15, saying the office could not legally comply.

The Justice Department supplied a statewide list containing personal information for more than 20,000 people, rather than a list limited to Los Angeles County, according to the response.

The county said federal officials provided neither evidence supporting their suspicions nor a process for independently confirming citizenship. Its response also said the department imposed a deadline shorter than the 48 hours its letter promised.

For voting purposes, applicants establish citizenship by signing a registration affidavit under penalty of perjury, the county’s attorneys wrote. They argued that the requested actions would conflict with voter protections, including a federal 90-day restriction on systematic voter removals before an election.

“The actions described would disenfranchise those in question without due process,” the response stated.

The Secretary of State’s office also challenged the federal list’s accuracy, citing a Los Angeles County sample.

Fewer than half of the sampled individuals had active registrations, more than 40 percent had canceled registrations, and nearly three-quarters had never voted, according to the state’s letter.

Among those whose birthplace was reported, more than a third were born in the United States, the letter said.

Other county officials questioned the demands and the underlying data.

“I expect this accusation to fall apart like we saw recently in Nevada,” Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters Kristin B. Connelly told the AP.

Connelly referred to Trump’s July claims about noncitizens on voter rolls. After his administration was asked to identify the alleged noncitizen voters in Nevada, the number of actual registered noncitizens turned out to be zero, according to the AP.

The concerns follow scrutiny of the government’s investigative methods described in earlier Patch coverage.

In a separate case, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued an order restricting certain Homeland Security voter investigations after finding that flawed data included U.S. citizens and that investigative tactics intimidated people involved in voter outreach. She temporarily delayed the order to allow an appeal.

The county letters intensified a dispute between California and the Trump administration before the midterm elections.

The federal government sued Oct. 15 to prevent the state from counting mail-in ballots belonging to people it identified as likely noncitizens.

A Ninth Circuit appeals panel was scheduled to hear arguments Sunday on whether California could be compelled to comply.

In its Oct. 24 letter, the Secretary of State’s office said a court was expected to rule on the federal request for emergency relief on or shortly after Tuesday.

Justice Department spokeswoman Kiersten Pels said Saturday that the department was explicitly “not requesting a purge, cancellation of registrations, or any programmatic action.”

Instead, she said, federal officials sought cooperation to “ensure the most secure election in California history.”

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