While a federal district court in California considers the Justice Department's lawsuit against the state over 20,000 voters the government claims are noncitizens — a decision was likely on Wednesday and almost certain to rule for the defendants — local election officials are looking through the names on the list, at the Trump administration's written request. State-based outlet CalMatters reports that the officials are having difficulty making sense of and even reading the information:
Butte County Clerk-Recorder Keaton Denlay said he received one such letter and a demand to not count ballots from a list of 47 people.
“Upon inspection of the list of names, it appeared to be a print screen of a poorly formatted excel spreadsheet with missing and jumbled information,” he said in a statement.
...
Fresno County Registrar of Voters James Kus also received a letter, but he said he couldn’t tell how many ballots federal prosecutors wanted him to segregate, since the “not particularly legible” list was a printed sheet, in small font, and “not in a format that facilitates counting or reviewing.” He said the county already follows state and federal voter registration laws.
“We will not be deviating from those legal requirements for this letter,” Kus told CalMatters in an email.
As a panel of the Ninth Circuit court of appeals wrote earlier this week, the administration — which sought last-minute, emergency intervention from the judiciary to require that any ballots from the 20,000 voters be segregated — had plenty of time to act against the state, given the Department of Homeland Security's initial notification to California and other states about its allegations of noncitizens on their rolls in July. "Jumbled information," "not particularly legible" information — almost sounds rushed.
(Chris Deaton)