Newsom Gets Defensive After Feds Catch 20,000 Suspected Noncitizens on Voter Rolls

Here’s what you need to know about the mess unfolding in California right now. The Justice Department just charged 28 foreign nationals with voting illegally in the state, and some of them voted multiple times. Multiple times. Let that sink in for a moment while Gavin Newsom’s office sends snarky tweets about election law.

Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for California’s Central District and a Trump appointee, isn’t playing around. He surfaced a court document this week that should alarm anyone who believes in the integrity of our elections. Monica Flores, an official with the LA County Registrar’s Office, admitted in a legal declaration that her office “is not equipped or authorized to verify voter citizenship because it does not independently house citizenship-related information beyond the voter attestation.”

Read that again slowly. They don’t verify citizenship. They just take your word for it.

The declaration came as part of a federal lawsuit trying to force California to verify the citizenship of more than 20,000 people the feds believe are likely noncitizens who got mail ballots for this year’s midterm elections. Twenty thousand. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a small city’s worth of potentially illegal voters diluting the voices of actual American citizens.

Essayli called this admission a “massive concession” and he’s right. American citizens’ votes are being watered down in California, and the state’s response is to act offended that anyone would dare question their procedures. Newsom’s press office fired back with the kind of condescending nonsense you’d expect from Sacramento these days. They claimed California follows a 1993 federal law requiring people who register through the DMV to swear under penalty of perjury that they’re eligible to vote.

Well sure, they swear. And we all know how much that’s worth when there’s zero verification happening on the backend. You know what? I could swear I’m the Queen of England under penalty of perjury, but that doesn’t make it true. The issue isn’t whether people are asked to attest to their citizenship. The issue is whether anyone’s actually checking.

Newsom’s office even threw in a petty jab at Essayli, suggesting maybe he should be demoted to “Second Assistant” since he apparently doesn’t understand election law. That’s rich coming from an administration that just admitted it can’t verify who’s legally voting.

Essaili didn’t back down. He fired back by citing two federal statutes that make it crystal clear that noncitizens voting in federal elections is unlawful. Because it is. This shouldn’t be controversial, but here we are in 2026 debating whether states should bother checking if voters are actually citizens.

The core of the lawsuit cuts right to the heart of election integrity. Should California take additional steps to verify citizenship when federal investigators flag serious problems with the voter rolls? Most reasonable people would say yes. California is saying no while hiding behind bureaucratic excuses.

Here’s how the feds found this problem. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services cross-checked California voter registration records with federal immigration data. This preliminary investigation identified more than 20,000 registered voters who are likely noncitizens. Mail ballots started going out October 1. The Justice Department filed its complaint on October 15, asking a federal court to require California to set aside those mail ballots until citizenship could be verified.

Flores argued that’s now basically impossible because once a ballot’s signature gets verified, the ballot is separated from its identifying envelope and mixed in with hundreds of thousands of others. How convenient. The system is designed in a way that makes catching fraud nearly impossible after the fact.

This is the frustrating reality of election security debates. One side points to specific problems with evidence and asks for common sense verification. The other side deflects with procedural arguments and acts like asking questions about citizenship is somehow an assault on democracy. But you know what actually threatens democracy? Allowing noncitizens to vote and dilute the franchise of actual Americans.

The free market works because property rights are clear and contracts are enforced. Elections should work the same way. The right to vote belongs to citizens, and that right means nothing if we don’t protect it from fraud and abuse. Limited government doesn’t mean incompetent government. It means government that does its core functions well, and verifying voter eligibility is about as core as it gets.

California keeps talking about how they follow federal law, but following the bare minimum isn’t enough when federal investigators are handing you a list of 20,000 problems. This isn’t about making voting harder for legal citizens. This is about making sure only legal citizens are voting in the first place. That used to be something everyone agreed on, back when we had a shared understanding of basic civic principles.

The charges against those 28 foreign nationals prove this isn’t a theoretical problem. It’s happening. The question is whether California cares enough to fix it or whether Newsom’s administration would rather send snarky tweets and hope everyone forgets about it after the election. Based on what we’ve seen this week, I think we know the answer.

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