Trump targets California election workers with raw intimidation

By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso · October 17, 2026

The Justice Department is threatening California officials with prison over an unvetted list of voters, abusing federal authority to bully local workers and suppress the vote.

When the threat comes on a thumb drive

You learn early on the border that when a man in a crisp suit hands you a sealed envelope with a deadline, he is not looking for the truth. He is looking for a photograph. He wants to show the boss back in Washington that he made the locals jump. That is what happened in October. The United States Department of Justice delivered a password-protected thumb drive to Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan, as reported by The Guardian and CNN. Inside were 20,000 names. The federal government claimed these residents were likely noncitizens sent mail-in ballots for the November election. It gave local officials a 48-hour deadline to review the list and segregate the votes.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement compiled the list, according to reporting by Axios and CNN. They matched public voter rolls against internal agency data through third-party software. But as California Secretary of State Shirley Weber made clear, the data lacked both the detail and function to be of any investigative use. Similar administration-created lists in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Nevada were previously found to be less than accurate. Nevada records showed that an isolated subset of alleged noncitizens all appeared to be citizens upon manual review. Dean Logan’s office refused to open the unvetted device immediately, citing established data privacy and information security protocols. The Trump administration did not pause to verify its work. It went straight to court.

The machinery of intimidation

On October 15, the Justice Department sued California, as detailed in reports by Axios and ABC News. It sought to prevent the state from counting mail-in ballots from the 20,000 flagged voters until their citizenship status was confirmed. Attorney General Todd Blanche declared in a press release that state-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable. Meanwhile, acting deputy attorney general Trent McCotter sent letters threatening criminal prosecution. McCotter warned that election workers who knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime. President Donald Trump posted a link to the story on Truth Social with the unsparing verdict that they will all go to jail for a long period of time.

The man signing these threats is Trent McCotter. He made financial contributions to Trump-affiliated joint fundraising committees during the 2024 election cycle before taking his post at the Justice Department. Just weeks prior, Donald Trump signed a proclamation claiming his administration ended the weaponization of government. Yet here is that same administration deploying prosecutorial threats to interfere with local vote counting three weeks before an election.

Legal scholars have not minced words about the maneuver, as noted in dispatches from The Guardian and CNN. University of California-Los Angeles law professor Rick Hasen called the federal complaint full of language about the supremacy clause and federal preemption. He noted that federal law does not preempt the state's right to run its election and judge the qualifications of its voters. Loyola Marymount University law professor Justin Levitt dismissed the lawsuit as a press release masquerading as litigation. He noted that courts have repeatedly rejected the administration's attempts to seize sensitive state voter data. The parallel is found in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law used federal authority to protect the franchise of marginalized groups against state-level suppression. Here, that exact mechanism of federal intervention is inverted to suppress votes and bully the people who count them.

Standing up to the badge

We have seen this script before. We saw it in Arizona v. United States when the federal government and state actors clashed over jurisdictional boundaries. We saw it when SB 1070 created a bloodstream of fear that targeted noncitizens based on suspicion of status. The goal is never administrative accuracy. The goal is chaos. As voting expert Sean Morales Doyle noted in reporting by ABC News, the administration is laying the groundwork to challenge results after Election Day. It is putting a nail in the wall for something to hang its hat on later when the counts come in close. Democratic senators Alex Padilla, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Dick Durbin demanded the Justice Department commit to not seizing ballots before the midterms are certified. Meanwhile, Governor Gavin Newsom denounced the lawsuit as a sad, desperate attempt to suppress California voters.

The people who are wrong here are the political appointees in Washington who treat the franchise as a hostile foreign territory. They are weaponizing the Department of Justice to intimidate civil servants who are simply doing their jobs under state and federal law. Justice requires that Dean Logan, Shirley Weber, and every frontline worker in California complete the tabulation of every valid ballot without facing the shadow of a federal indictment. When the state stands firm against these bullies, it protects not just 20,000 targeted voters. It protects the basic premise that the people run the government, not the other way around.

Trump targets California election workers with raw intimidation

When the threat comes on a thumb drive

The machinery of intimidation

Standing up to the badge

Sources