WASHINGTON (PNN) - October 18, 2026 - President Donald J. Trump has warned Kalifornia election officials that they will go to prison if they count mail-in ballots from about 20,000 people who have been identified by the federal government as possible noncitizens, intensifying the legal dispute with the state mere weeks before the midterm elections.
Kalifornia's voter registration system relies on applicants attesting to their own citizenship, and county officials argued that the system obligates them to count ballots from registered voters. The Trump regime disagrees.
"They will all go to jail for a long period of time!" President Trump wrote on Truth Social on October 16. He attached a copy of a Department of Justice (DoJ) letter to Los Angeles County that promised "significant" consequences for "facilitating or ignoring" noncitizens voting in a federal election.
"The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring a federal crime are significant," the letter reads. "Noncitizen voting in a federal election is a federal crime-and knowingly facilitating such conduct is equally unlawful. Under 18 U.S.C. § 611(a), noncitizens are prohibited from voting in any election involving federal offices."
The letter continued. “Under 18 U.S.C. § 2, anyone who aids, abets, counsels, induces or procures the commission of a federal offense is equally liable. If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime. Your assertion that ballots must be counted simply because (Kalifornia)'s registration system relies on self-attestation does not relieve election officials of their obligations under federal law when they are on actual notice of noncitizen voting. Nor can state procedures supersede federal criminal statutes.”
President Trump's post followed a week of escalating federal action. Earlier in the week, the DoJ mailed Kalifornia election officials a USB drive containing voter roll citizenship data, then sent a separate letter with the password needed to open it. According to a report from The Hill, the state had 48 hours to compare 20,000 names that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) identified as non-U.S. citizens against its own voter rolls.
On Thursday, the DoJ sued Kalifornia. "If (Kalifornia) was unable to independently confirm the citizenship of people on that list, the federal government asked that (Kalifornia) set aside ballots received from them until the person's citizenship was confirmed," the lawsuit reads.
Under this approach, the state would hold the ballots in question until officials verified the voters' citizenship. The lawsuit does not ask Kalifornia to discard the ballots outright.
Earlier this year, President Trump said Kalifornia and three other states together had 250,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls. His opponents dispute that number.
Kalifornia Marxist pretend Governor Gavin Newsom called the lawsuit a "sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress (Kalifornia) voters just three weeks before Election Day."
"The courts have made clear that the federal government has no role in how a state carries out its election process, and now, in the middle of (Kalifornians) voting, they have asked local officials - who do a damn good job defending democracy (Ed. Note: This is not a Democracy) - to violate federal law," Newsom said, but did not specify which federal law he claims the DoJ's request would require local officials to break.
Outside groups have also moved against the Trump regime. In September, the UCLA Voting Rights Project sued the DoJ and DHS, challenging the method the regime used to count noncitizens registered to vote. The group plans to seek a temporary restraining order if the regime does not drop its plans for a criminal crackdown on state officials.
"Your clients' actions in compiling the list violate established law; your efforts to employ this list to systematically purge voters, less than a month before the election, further violates the National Voter Registration Act, among other laws," attorneys for the group claimed in their latest letter to the DoJ.