June 25 (UPI) — Orange County (Calif.) Registrar of Voters Robert Page has unlawfully refused to provide complete records showing the removal of non-citizens from voter registration lists, the Department of Justice says.
The DOJ on Wednesday accused Page of refusing to provide records showing the removal of non-citizens from voter registration records in violation of federal election laws.
The DOJ filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles and named Page as the sole defendant.
The DOJ accuses Page of violating the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which require him to maintain voter lists and disclose them.
“Voting by non-citizens is a federal crime, and states and counties that refuse to disclose all requested voter information are in violation of well-established federal elections laws,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said Wednesday in a news release.
“Removal of non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls is critical to ensuring that the state’s voter rolls are accurate and that elections in California are conducted without fraudulent voting,” Dhillon said.
“The Department of Justice will hold jurisdictions that refuse to comply with federal voting laws accountable,” he added.
The lawsuit arises from a June 2 complaint that Attorney General Pam Bondi received from the family member of a “non-citizen” in Orange County.
The complaint says the “non-citizen” received a mail-in ballot that the person did not request but allegedly was sent by Page.
Maureen Riordan, Acting Chief of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section, on the same day asked Page to provide records dating from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present and showing the cancellations of voter registration records due to respective individuals not being U.S. citizens.
Riordan also asked for records for the same period that show the respective voter registration applications, registration records, voting histories and related correspondences for each cancelled voter registration.
The DOJ said Page responded to Bondi’s request on June 16 by providing records that redacted state driver’s license and ID card numbers, social security numbers, state-assigned voter ID numbers, language preferences and images of each person’s signatures.
Page “relied upon several California statutes as the basis for the redactions,” the DOJ said.
The DOJ a day later notified Page that the documents he provided make it impossible to accurately assess compliance with federal election laws due to the redactions.
The DOJ also notified Page that his reliance on state law to prevent the DOJ from receiving the requested information is pre-empted by federal law.
Federal law requires Page to “maintain for at least two years … all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters,” according to the DOJ.
Page on Monday, through Assistant Orange County Attorney James Steinmann, confirmed he won’t provide the unredacted records that were requested by the DOJ, the lawsuit alleges.
The DOJ accuses Page of one count each of violating the HAVA and NVRA and asks the court to provide the unredacted information sought by Bondi and others in the Justice Department.
Orange County officials declined to comment on the matter due to the “pending or ongoing litigation.”
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