Judges who examined the lists questioned whether they were reliable at all .
Hours before Americans voted in the midterm elections that delivered a setback to Donald Trump, the US Supreme Court refused to let his government stop California from counting thousands of ballots it claimed were linked to “likely” non-citizens.
Trump has pointed to India in pressing for checks on whether all American voters are even US citizens. India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has removed about 13 crore names from voter lists, though the Election Commission of India (ECI) has not published how many of those were found to be non-citizens. In Trump’s California focus, there are two Indians among the 28 people facing individual allegations of voter fraud.
Political rhetoric, however, has been similar in both countries, focused on “infiltrators”.
Why The List Did Not Hold Up
The department warned that election workers who counted them could be prosecuted. Trump endorsed the warning on Truth Social: “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!! There was a precedent for this kind of uncertain data being presented as a big crackdown on voter fraud. Under a DHS programme called the ‘Unlawful Voter Initiative’, agents visited homes in nine states to question people about citizenship and voting. The push to remove non-citizens from voter lists did not fail wholly. Individual cases continue.
Through the Justice Department, Trump’s government wanted California to set aside ballots from about 20,000 registered voters until their citizenship could be checked. When Los Angeles County officials checked a sample of 200 names, 38.9 per cent of the records that listed a birthplace showed a US birth, which is strong evidence of citizenship. Of the 200, 112 had cancelled or inactive registrations. In Nevada, the federal government initially floated nearly 16,000 names, but cut that to 185 after a manual review. All 185 turned out to be citizens. On September 25, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to offer states its SAVE citizenship database, which 27 states use, mostly those ruled by Trump’s Republican Party.
The review “indicates that the October List is unreliable”, officials told a court. The Trump administration did say that “there may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens”. Trump’s administration, meanwhile, also took its hunt for “non-citizen voters” to people’s doorsteps. Investigators were told to target those who had acquired citizenship by naturalisation, as opposed to birth, to check whether they had voted before becoming citizens.
