Newsom Doth Protest Over DOJ Voter Fraud Allegations and 20,000 Noncitizens Receiving Ballots

California Governor Gavin Newsom and his adolescent communications team sent out an email this afternoon claiming:

Trump DOJ makes shocking admissions; taken to task for latest allegations of voter fraud

What you need to know: Claims of widespread voter fraud by the Trump Administration in California began unraveling on Monday.

Methinks Gov. Newsom doth protest too much over DOJ voter fraud allegations and 20,000 noncitizens receiving ballots. His junior staff certainly is.

As F.A. United States Attorney Bill Essayli explains in plain English:

California has no safeguards to prevent noncitizens from voting. Anyone can register and vote under California law with no verification required. With ZERO cooperation from CA officials, we verified that at least 20,000 noncitizens are receiving ballots. The actual number is much higher.

To show how easy it is for an illegal immigrant to register to vote, we have to step back a few years.

California’s Motor Voter program has been plagued with problems since its rollout in April 2018.

In January 2019, we learned that DMV and county voter registrars told the California Secretary of State in 2018 the Motor Voter program was not ready, the Globe reported. Motor Voter automatically registers voters when they renew or obtain a drivers license. The DMV and registrars asked then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla to hold off on the roll-out. But Padilla and the state went ahead anyway.

The new system had not been properly checked, according to the voter registrars. They had valid concerns, said then-Assemblyman Jim Patterson (R-Fresno). “The people of California are suffering with the DMV and its 1980’s technology,” Patterson said. “And DMV customers are actually annoyances to DMV employees.”

Patterson told the Globe in 2019 that his office was still getting reports from constituents whose Party registration was changed after a visit to the DMV. “This is how ballot harvesting is happening,” Patterson said.

Patterson was a member of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, and pushed hard for a bipartisan audit of the DMV, including the Motor Voter Program. Then-Assemblyman Rudy Salas (D-Bakersfield) and Patterson made the bipartisan request to audit the DMV Motor Voter Program of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee at a special hearing in May 2019.

Democrats on the JLAC committee declined to authorize the audit, despite very serious concerns of voter fraud within the Motor Voter program. In addition to registering illegal aliens to vote, “a number of families with 16-year-olds are getting registered to vote – not just pre-registered, as legislated,” Assemblyman Patterson said in an interview with Globe.

“The SEIU intervened on the audit request, and let the governor know, as they did with Gov. Brown, they didn’t want it moving forward,” Assemblyman Jim Patterson said. “They were really worried about the motor voter program and what would be found. The ruling Party didn’t want to have to explain the screw up of Motor Voter or even the Real ID program,” Patterson added.

That was in 2019. We are seeing the fallout 7 years later. Just ask US Attorney Bill Essayli.

So, how did this happen?

By March, 2018, more than one million “undocumented” immigrants received driver’s licenses from the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which automatically registered them to vote under the “Motor Voter” program, California Globe reported. “Last September, the DMV sent out 23,000 “erroneous” voter registrations they blamed on ‘technical errors. Padilla proclaimed himself ‘extremely disappointed and deeply frustrated’ but legitimate voters could believe he was delighted. The odds are strong that illegals made up most if not all of the newly registered voters but Padilla wasn’t saying how many made it to the polls in November.”

Last week the United States Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit against California, seeking an order to sequester, and not tabulate, vote-by-mail ballots from roughly 20,000 people the federal government identifies as “likely noncitizens.

This follows Oct. 13 letters, to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan, by acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, who provided officials in Los Angeles County with a “password-protected thumb drive” with the names of people ​the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens” and were sent mail-in ballots from California.

“For individuals whom you cannot independently confirm citizenship status, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” McCotter wrote.

Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security raised broad concerns alleging more than 190,000 noncitizens on California voter rolls. In a July 16, 2026 letter from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (and similar letters to officials in New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania), DHS stated that a review of publicly available voter registration data indicated “there may be as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California.” It gave an example of 81,336 registrants matching name, date of birth, address, and Social Security number to non-citizens in DHS files. The combined figures cited for the four states were roughly: California 190,832; New Jersey 35,152; Nevada 15,903; Pennsylvania 14,576, totaling over 250,000.

California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada opted not to use a new federal citizenship database, a Homeland Security review found more than a quarter million noncitizens registered to vote, Just the News reported.

25 states ran more than 68 million records through an expanded version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database and reported more than 28,000 potential noncitizen matches plus hundreds of thousands of deceased registrants.

Governor Gavin Newsom said the DOJ action is unsubstantiated, politically motivated interference close to the election, and a threat to eligible voters’ rights. “This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day,” Newsom said. “Courts have made clear the federal government has no role in running state elections. We will defend free and fair elections in the Golden State and call out every authoritarian attempt to undermine our democracy.”

Newsom and his toddlers quoted every reliably Left/Democrat media outlet as proof of his claims.

As US Attorney Bill Essayli explained:

The media narrative in California keeps shifting as they struggle to respond to overwhelming evidence of tens of thousands of ineligible voters on the state’s rolls. Claims have evolved from “there are no ineligible voters” to “only a very small number,” then “it’s a common clerical error,” and finally “they didn’t really mean to register and vote.” None of these are legal defenses to criminal charges. California should immediately cooperate with the federal government to avoid subjecting noncitizens and itself to further legal jeopardy.

Then, earlier this afternoon, Essayli posted this:

Massive concession: Los Angeles election officials just told a federal court they have no independent way to verify citizenship beyond what voters attest. (They simply take their word for it.) Under federal law, only citizens may vote in federal elections. Yet California has not acted on the list of 20,000 suspected noncitizens or agreed to set aside their ballots. American citizens’ votes are being diluted in California.

— F.A. United States Attorney Bill Essayli (@USAttyEssayli) October 20, 2026

“California has a noncitizen voting problem.”