Northern California counties hit with subpoenas over alleged noncitizen voting ahead of midterm elections

Several counties in Northern California were hit with fresh grand jury subpoenas over alleged noncitizen voting just days before the midterm elections, local officials told CBS News.

Officials from both Santa Clara and Sonoma counties told CBS News they each received a subpoena issued by a grand jury at the behest of federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California.

CBS News has reached out to the Justice Department for comment. The subpoenas were previously reported by Bloomberg Law.

The subpoenas are the latest effort by the Justice Department to pressure California to set aside some 20,000 ballots that it claims were mailed to potential noncitizens ahead of Tuesday's election. 

State and local officials have declined to do so, saying they have concerns with the accuracy of the federal government's list and fear that segregating the ballots could disenfranchise legitimate voters.

While the Justice Department's civil lawsuit seeking ballot segregation was ultimately rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court shortly before the election, the DOJ has pursued parallel criminal investigations that have seemingly expanded in recent weeks to focus not just on individual noncitizens who may have voted in prior elections, but also on the actions of state and local officials themselves.

Two weeks before the midterm elections, county officials in Los Angeles were also served grand jury subpoenas that requested copies of communications with federal officials concerning noncitizen voting, as well as any records pertaining to the county's procedures for identifying and screening out noncitizens from the voter rolls.

The deadline for Los Angeles to respond to those requests for records was set for Wednesday, Nov. 4, although that deadline has since been extended for a few weeks, according to a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.

A spokesperson for Sonoma County told CBS News that the subpoena it received on Saturday requests information about an individual whom the DOJ alleges may have voted in prior elections, as well as records concerning how the county has responded to the Justice Department's demands that it segregate ballots cast by people who are suspected of being noncitizens.

The Santa Clara subpoena also made similar such requests, according to a person familiar with its contents.

Both of them appeared to focus, at least in part, on whether the counties had complied with the Justice Department's prior demands to segregate the ballots, even though multiple federal courts  — up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court — refused to force them to take such a step, the source added.

"The Sonoma County Registrar of Voters is committed to conducting fair, transparent elections in full compliance with the law while preserving access for all eligible voters. We have consistently maintained that there is no legal basis for the federal government's requests for Sonoma County to segregate ballots," said Sonoma County's counsel Joshua Myers in a statement.

"To do so would violate several laws that ensure the safe and lawful administration of our elections," Myers said.

Tony LoPresti, counsel to Santa Clara County, took a similar position in response to the subpoena.

"We have been steadfast in our position that there's no legal basis for the federal government's attempts to intervene in the elections process," he said in a statement.

This is not the first time that Santa Clara County has received a grand jury subpoena in recent weeks related to the topic.

A spokesperson for Santa Clara's Registrar of Voters told CBS News that the office also received two subpoenas in early September, both of which requested specific voter information. The spokesperson said other counties had received similar requests around that time.

Both lawyers said they are still evaluating the Justice Department's demands for documents.

Federal prosecutors in California have since filed criminal charges against several dozen people whom they allege may have unlawfully voted in prior elections.

Senior leaders at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., ordered California's four U.S. attorneys to issue the flurry of recent subpoenas to county officials or else they could face termination, two sources briefed on the matter told CBS News. 

Although a federal judge in the days before the election had ordered the Justice Department to cease issuing threats to state and local election officials, that court order was eventually lifted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.