Employees of the Los Angeles County registrar’s office have been ordered to appear before a federal grand jury on Wednesday, Nov. 4, the day after the midterm election. The Justice Department issued the subpoenas in the same week a federal judge told it to stop threatening the people who count California’s votes.
The subpoenas, which ABC News and CBS News reported, demand internal documents and communications about federal requests for information on “noncitizen voting,” along with records on the office’s methods for “screening for unlawful voting by aliens.” CBS reported they went out between Oct. 21 and 24. A department spokesperson said it “does not comment on leaks about alleged grand jury subpoenas.”
The people served are the ones who process the ballots of Black voters in the nation’s largest county. Black Americans know what happens when election workers become targets. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a Black mother and daughter who worked the count in Fulton County, Georgia, were driven from their lives by false fraud claims after 2020. For decades, enforcing the right to vote, especially for Black citizens, was the Justice Department’s job. In California, the department is now the one demanding those workers’ records.
The subpoenas sit inside a larger fight. The department sued California on Oct. 15, asking a court to make the state set aside about 20,000 mail ballots from people it alleges are noncitizens. California’s lawyers have said the government still will not say how the list was generated.
U.S. District Judge David Carter refused. At a hearing Tuesday, Carter said: “This court believes it would be wise that any threats to state and county election employees cease immediately.” The written order Wednesday evening said the department’s demand “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens.” It added: “The court reiterates what it said yesterday: these threats must stop.” The order found the demand violated the National Voter Registration Act, which bars changes to election procedures within 90 days of a federal election.
On Thursday, Carter appointed a special master, Daniel B. Garrie, to build the factual record on the department’s claims. On Friday, a federal appeals court rejected the department’s latest attempt to force California to set the ballots aside, NBC News reported.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli had posted: “Knowingly processing noncitizen ballots is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. §§ 611 and 2.” Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan responded: “Threats and intimidation have no place in elections.” He said Carter’s admonishment was “well placed and appreciated.”
A federal judge in Atlanta took a similar view in July, quashing a department subpoena for the names of Fulton County’s 2020 election workers and writing that disclosure “threatens to chill participation in future elections,” CNN reported.
The workers are due before the grand jury Wednesday. California has until Dec. 11 to certify its results.
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