OC’s standoff with federal government over voter data gets a trial date

A trial date has been set  to determine whether Orange County is legally obligated to give the U.S. Department of Justice sensitive personal data of non-citizens removed from voter rolls.

The federal government sued the county earlier this year to obtain the full, unredacted records of 17 voters who had been removed from the county’s rolls since 2020 because they weren’t citizens. The O.C. Registrar of Voters says handing over that data, including signatures and Social Security and driver’s license numbers, would violate state privacy laws — unless the DOJ first obtains a criminal warrant.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter set a trial date of March 31, 2026, although it's unclear whether the case will get to that point. The county’s lawyer, Suzanne Shoai, told Carter she intends to ask the court to dismiss the case.

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Why the DOJ wants the data

The DOJ’s push for Orange County data is part of a nationwide effort to get full access to state-controlled data about voters. Just in California, the DOJ has requested voter data from Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco counties, according to Michael Gates, deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s civil rights division. He said additional lawsuits similar to the one filed against Orange County’s Registrar of Voters could be coming to other counties and states across the country.

Gates, who formerly served as the city attorney for Huntington Beach, was representing the DOJ at Monday’s scheduling hearing in the federal courthouse in downtown Santa Ana. He told Carter the issue underlying the lawsuit is whether the county is maintaining voter rolls in compliance with federal law. He said some counties had been "recalcitrant, obstinate, unwilling to cooperate” with the DOJ’s request to access sensitive voter data he says is needed to verify compliance.

After the hearing, Gates told LAist that having access to unredacted data about people removed from voter rolls is necessary to “test the reliability of the data” provided by local officials. He said he believed the actual number of non-citizens registered to vote in Orange County was much larger than the 17 records turned over to the DOJ. In a county of more than 3 million people, he said, 17 records is “not the universe of non-citizen voters.”

What does a dog have to do with any of this?

President Donald Trump has long alleged that the Democratic Party has allowed mass immigration in order to increase its voter base. And he has been fixated on non-U.S. citizens voting in elections, which studies show is extremely rare.

Recently, a conservative activist in Costa Mesa confessed she registered her dog to vote — and voted as the dog in two elections — with the goal of exposing flaws in the state’s voting system. She is now facing felony charges and up to six years in state prison. Gates noted in this week’s federal court hearing that the dog was not included in the 17 records provided by the Registrar of Voters in response to the DOJ’s request.

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who previously held Gates’s role in the Obama administration’s Justice Department, told LAist the DOJ’s lawsuit against Orange County was “weird.” He noted the county offered to share the requested data with the DOJ — before the federal government filed suit — under a confidentiality agreement. But the DOJ refused.

“I cannot for the life of me imagine the proper, legitimate answer as to why the DOJ wouldn’t have accepted that,” he said.

Gates maintains the DOJ is entitled to the information under federal law, without a warrant or confidentiality agreement.

Levitt said he didn’t buy the government’s rationale for requesting the unredacted voter data. He noted that Reuters and other news outlets have reported recently that the DOJ intends to share voter data with the Department of Homeland Security for criminal- and immigration-related investigations.

Levitt said federal privacy law prohibits the government from collecting information without publicly disclosing why it wants the information and who has access to it.

He also said he didn’t think evidence of a few people voting fraudulently would help the government answer the question of whether the county is properly maintaining its voter rolls and purging people who are not eligible to vote, for example, because they died or moved.

Asked whether people should be worried about voter fraud, given the voting-dog incident, Levitt said he did not believe that was an issue.

“ If you took away the number of people who try to break the system to prove that the system doesn't work, then the system works fine,” Levitt said.

He said any effort at tightening up voting rules and voter verification needs to be weighed against the cost and effect on turnout.

“We could have a system that’s totally safe from [fraud] if nobody voted,” Levitt said.