DOJ charges 28 with unlawful voting, other election-related offenses in California

The Justice Department announced Monday that it has charged 28 individuals in California with unlawful voting and other election-related crimes, and did not rule out prosecuting election workers who are "processing the ballots" there.

The 28 individuals -- some of whom the DOJ says are green card holders in the United States -- were charged with "some combination of unlawful voting by an alien, a false claim of U.S. citizenship in order to vote or register to vote, and knowingly depriving the residents of California of a fair and impartial election process," Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a press conference Monday.

The 28 people charged are on the list of among 20,000 names the DOJ sent to California last week as those who the state provided mail-in ballots for next month's midterm election despite the DOJ suspecting them of being illegally in the United States. On Thursday the DOJ filed suit against California for failing to review the list and act on it.

"After we provided that information, California and L.A. didn't come back and say, 'No, you're wrong. These folks are citizens.' They didn't say, 'Actually, let's work together and try to figure out whether they're citizens,'" McCotter said at Monday's press briefing. "Instead, L.A. County, in particular, said that they would not even attempt to open the list because of concerns about IT integrity."

More than 16 million votes were cast in California in the last presidential election.

Officials in California characterized the DOJ's request as legally baseless and a last-ditch effort by the Trump administration to intervene in the state's election process, despite facing more than two dozen straight losses in court over the past year in its efforts to compel states to hand over their voter rolls. 

The Los Angeles county clerk said in a statement last week that they were refusing to access the contents of the thumb drive the DOJ provided -- which was delivered to the office with a password attached on a sticky note -- "because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols."

"We do not consider the device a secure medium," L.A. County Clerk Dean Logan said in the statement. "Additionally, the letter does not specify the number of individuals involved or describe the information contained in the records."

More than 150 million people voted in the last presidential election. President Donald Trump and Republican leaders have characterized the alleged scourge of noncitizen voting as a pressing threat to free and fair elections, but experts maintain that cases of non-citizen voting are extraordinarily rare.

McCotter said Monday that the Department of Homeland Security arrived at the list of 20,000 names by cross-referencing the publicly available voter rolls in California with "other government databases" and "other public information."

"The next step subtracted anybody who had any sort of evidence of actually being a citizen. So we looked at State Department records, passport records, Social Security Administration, and alien files. We looked whether someone may have gotten derivative citizenship from a parent, or maybe they were naturalized citizens. All those people [were] knocked off."

McCotter said they then manually verified the 20,000 names who "are likely not citizens of the United States on California's voter rolls." 

Regarding the potential prosecution of California election workers who processed voter registrations for those suspected of being non-citizens, McCotter said, "I'm not going to prejudge or pre-announce any sort of criminal case, but this is not an unusual doctrine. The idea that even if you don't do something yourself illegally, that if you help someone else do it or knowingly help them, that could lead to charges for that person. This is a very well-established legal doctrine, aiding and abetting. It applies to all federal crimes, not just elections."

The 28 arrests were made as part of Operation Protect the Vote, and U.S. First Assistant Attorney Bill Essayli claimed that "many" of those arrested voted in prior elections. 

"Just in the last seven weeks alone, the department has now charged 113 people across 20 different states with illegal voting or illegal registration," announced Essayli, who said that the DOJ is pursuing thousands of "similar cases" around the nation.

The DOJ previously sent Nevada officials a list of 185 individuals that DHS said were potential non-citizens on that state's voter rolls, but Nevada officials determined that everyone on the list was a lawful U.S. citizen.

 ABC News' Alexander Mallin contributed to this report.