The U.S. Department of Justice has sued Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page for allegedly not providing records related to non-citizens’ removal from voter registration lists.
The Justice Department alleged that Page refused to provide full, unredacted records related to the removal of non-citizens from the county’s voter registration lists and did not maintain an accurate voter list in violation of the Help America Vote Act, a 2002 law that made sweeping reforms to the country’s voting process. It said the records Page provided redacted certain personal information, including social security and state ID numbers.
The lawsuit alleged that Orange County has “undermined” voters’ confidence in the elections process by “refusing transparency of its voter information, in violation of federal voting laws, and concealing the unlawful registration of ineligible, non-citizen voters.”
“Keeping voter registration rolls accurate and current ensures efficient and secure elections and promotes democratic engagement,” the lawsuit said. “Accurate voter registration lists are necessary to ensure only eligible electors can cast a ballot.”
But correspondence between representatives for the Justice Department and legal counsel for the registrar’s office — obtained and reviewed by the Southern California News Group — show there was an effort made by the registrar to provide the “sensitive information,” just in a manner that would include “assurances that such sensitive personal identifiers will remain confidential and be used for government purposes only.”
Page, in a June 16 email to the DOJ, said his office provided records pertaining to 17 registrants who self-reported being non-citizens or whose ineligibility was confirmed by the Orange County District Attorney’s office and therefore had their registrations canceled.
The records were provided via OneDrive, which required a link and passcode to download, and were “not public information accessible to all members of the public.” Redactions were made, Page noted in the email, to race, social security numbers, driver’s license and state ID numbers, language preference and signature images in compliance with state law.
A June 24 email from James Steinmann, legal counsel for the registrar, suggested a confidentiality agreement so that the office could provide the unredacted information requested and avoid a lawsuit.
“If that is a possible avenue to resolving the matter, we may be able to work out the details in a way that suits the needs of all parties,” Steinmann wrote.
There was no response to that email, Page said.
Page, when reached Wednesday morning, said the county does not comment on ongoing litigation.
The lawsuit said the Justice Department received a complaint from a family member of a non-citizen in Orange County who had allegedly received an unsolicited mail ballot from the county registrar, despite their citizenship status.
Michael Gates, the former Huntington Beach city attorney, posted a photo on X in October of a ballot that he said was mailed to someone who has lived in the U.S. for 10 years but is a non-citizen and has never voted before. The name and most of the Huntington Beach address is blurred out in the photo of what looks to be a mail ballot envelope from the Orange County registrar of voters.
Gates, who is now a deputy assistant attorney general and one of the lawyers listed on the lawsuit against Page, said he reported the ballot to the registrar. (It is not clear if that is the same ballot referenced in the lawsuit.)
🚨CA Non-Citizen Vote-By-Mail Ballot🚨 The other night while at an event, a gentleman presented this Official Ballot to me advising it was mailed to his home for his father-in-law who has lived in the U.S. for approximately 10 years, has never voted before, has never received a… pic.twitter.com/tVp8Za9qPa
— Attorney Michael E. Gates (@MichaelGatesESQ) October 19, 2024
The lawuist said the attorney general requested on June 2 documents from January 2020 that show the number of voter registration records in Orange County that have been canceled because the registrant did not meet citizenship requirements and more information about each cancelation, including copies of the application, voting history and related correspondence sent or received by the county registrar related to the registration.
The lawsuit said Page responded to the request but redacted certain information regarding non-citizens identified on the county’s voter registration list, including their driver’s license or state ID numbers, social security numbers, language preferences, and signature images.
The lawsuit said the redacted data “prohibits the attorney general from making an accurate assessment” of the registrar’s compliance with election laws. It also said Page relied on state law for the basis of the redactions, which it said is preempted by federal law.
Page was given until June 20 to provide the unredacted information, the lawsuit said.
While the lawsuit is consistent with a few other recent efforts by the Justice Department to enforce record-keeping requirements, it is also “a little weird,” said Justin Levitt, a constitutional law expert who teaches at Loyola Law School.
The Justice Department, Levitt said, “absolutely has the authority to ask for election data, but not for the years that they’ve requested.”
Federal law requires elections officials to keep for at least two years all records related to efforts “ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters.” It also requires election officials to keep for 22 months all election records, including ballots and voter registration documents, following an election, that can be reviewed by the attorney general.
The Justice Department, as it said in its lawsuit, is seeking records from 2020.
“The information they are requesting doesn’t fit what they say is the potential problem they are investigating,” said Levitt, who worked for the Biden administration to “ensure that every eligible American has secure, reliable access to a meaningful vote,” among other things, according to his bio.
“The DOJ said it was looking into records to make sure that Orange County had been maintaining their roles accurately, free of non-citizens,” he said. “The records of registration that it was asking for are those that had been canceled for failure to validate they were citizens or other inconsistencies. I don’t have any idea why they’d need redacted social security numbers or signatures if what they’re looking for are the numbers and names of people you’ve taken off the rolls for being allegedly non-citizens.”
“That’s an anomaly that I don’t understand.”
Aside from Gates, the lawsuit is led by Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general and former vice chair of the California Republican Party, and Bill Essayli, a U.S. attorney and former Inland state legislator, among others.
“Voting by non-citizens is a federal crime, and states and counties that refuse to disclose all requested voter information are in violation of well-established federal elections laws,” Dhillon, who works in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.
Levitt said the Justice Department’s efforts to enforce record-keeping requirements are in line with the work that several conservative non-profits have done in recent years. For example, Judicial Watch, a right-wing activist group, sued California last year, asking a court to require the state to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls.”
In general, though, Levitt said the voting-related requests in court by this Justice Department have been “comparatively normal” and “relatively in bounds” compared to maybe some other departments.
An “outlier” — albeit, the request was not made in court — is the Justice Department’s ask earlier this month from Colorado for all of its records related to the 2024 federal contests. That expansive request is for a “mindboggling amount of stuff,” said Levitt.
It’s too soon to tell, he said, if the Orange County case will turn out to be an outlier as well.
“I want to see what happens next,” Levitt said. “It’s a little weird — and raises some antenna because it’s a little weird — but it is closer to coloring in the lines than action outside of the voting zone that I’ve seen from the DOJ so far.”
California’s secretary of state notes on its website that one must be a U.S. citizen, resident of California, at least 18 years old on Election Day, not currently serving a state or federal prison term for a felony conviction, or not currently found to be mentally incompetent to vote by a court in order to be eligible to register to vote in the state.
In October, ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Page said his office averages about 60,000 updates each month to registration records, based on information from voters and official government sources.
“We take maintenance of our voter registration rolls and potential voter fraud seriously,” Page said then, answering a question about how the registrar of voters ensures elections are conducted properly and do not allow for non-citizens to vote.
He said then that no cases of non-citizens voting had been prosecuted in Orange County.
“The registrar of voters complies with the law requiring it to only register voters who have certified under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen,” Page said. “California Elections Code section 2112 states that a person certifying his or her U.S. citizenship on a voter registration affidavit shall be deemed evidence of citizenship. We are not authorized under state law to separately verify a voter’s citizenship.”
“Willfully lying about one’s eligibility to vote on a registration affidavit is a felony in California, carrying a penalty of up to three years in county jail. If a third party submits evidence of an illegal registration, we immediately report this to the district attorney and/or secretary of state for investigation.”
Page took over Orange County’s elections in 2022, after having worked for San Bernardino County for more than 20 years, including as its registrar of voters.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit comes as the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement efforts around the country, including in Southern California, where large-scale protests have broken out in recent weeks.
But Levitt noted the lawsuit comes from the Justice Department’s voting section.
“It’s possible the DOJ may have more than one law enforcement purpose in mind and might want to examine the records for fraudulent information,” he said. “It’s certainly possible, but I don’t see a particular sign of that beyond the broader context, and I don’t want to minimize the broader context.”
This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
