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Here's the scoop: Federal prosecutors in California’s Central District have confirmed that at least 20,000 people flagged on the state’s voter rolls are not U.S. citizens, and that these individuals received mail ballots for the current election cycle.

ALERT: The 20,000 noncitizen voters don’t include the following voters:

• Dead People
• Pets – Dogs, cats, fish, and lizards (no joke)
• Minor Children
• Phantoms – people with no identity, address, or contact information
• Multiple Voters – People who vote 30 to 100 times per election
• Cross-State voters – people who are not residents but live in foreign countries
• Members of foreign military
• People on life support
• Mentally changed persons in institutions
• Citizens of Mexico who drive north to vote in California
• And the list goes on and on….

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli described 20,000 as the verified floor, noting that a July Department of Homeland Security letter had earlier identified nearly 200,000 possible noncitizens on California rolls. His office has sued to sequester any returned ballots from the confirmed group, arguing that “one illegal vote cancels out the vote of an American citizen.”

California officials contest the list’s reliability, pointing to a sample review in which some records showed canceled or inactive status and a portion listed U.S. birthplaces. Even so, the state’s motor-voter system and limited independent citizenship checks have long drawn criticism for allowing self-attested registrations without robust federal cross-checks. Essayli has stressed that local officials lack ready access to the immigration and naturalization databases needed for real-time verification.

DHS has flagged potential noncitizens in multiple states, including preliminary reviews citing tens of thousands of possible matches in places such as New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Documented administrative errors have placed noncitizens on rolls elsewhere: New Jersey’s motor-vehicle system mistakenly registered roughly 6,600 self-declared noncitizens in a recent period, with hundreds later casting ballots; Virginia and Texas have each reported thousands of flagged noncitizens over multi-year reviews; and similar clerical or software glitches have surfaced in at least a dozen other states since 2000. Federal prosecutors have brought charges against dozens of noncitizens for illegal registration or voting in recent months across roughly 20 states.

These are not isolated incidents confined to one blue-state outlier. Automatic registration at DMVs, reliance on self-attestation, resistance to full data-sharing with federal citizenship databases, and the volume of mail ballots create recurring pathways for noncitizens to land on rolls nationwide.

California’s verified cases illustrate a maintenance failure that federal and state officials are still scrambling to address before ballots are fully tabulated.

Think California can clean up its voter records?

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