MENDOCINO CO., 11/3/26 — Mendocino County’s registrar of voters has refused a federal prosecutor’s demand to turn over Social Security numbers, driver’s license information and registration files for 23 county voters the Justice Department calls “likely aliens,” and to set aside any ballots they cast.
“It would be illegal for my office to withhold otherwise valid ballots based only on the assertions made in your letter,” Katrina Bartolomie wrote to Craig H. Missakian, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, on Oct. 28.
She also told him that more than half of the 23 people on his list had already canceled their registrations.
The Voice reviewed both letters.
A corrected list, hand-delivered
Missakian’s three-page letter is dated Oct. 23. It was hand-delivered to the elections office on Low Gap Road on Oct. 26, according to the county’s date stamp and Bartolomie’s reply. It was the Northern District’s second list of “likely aliens” sent to the registrar. The first one Missakian’s department sent Mendocino County named people who live elsewhere.
“The first letter, they were all from Humboldt County, so we couldn’t do anything,” Bartolomie said in an interview with the Mendocino Voice on the morning of Oct. 28. “Then they corrected it with our correct ones, our correct residents.” Of the second list, she said: “There were 23, and they all reside in Mendocino County.”
At that point her office told the Northern District only that it had the list. “We haven’t responded because we didn’t get our correct list until Monday,” she said.
The letter gave the county 48 hours to “commit to working with DOJ and DHS to identify who on the accompanying list is a citizen and who is not.” That meant sending the nonpublic part of each person’s registration: a Social Security number, a copy of a state ID or driver’s license or the information on it, the registration application, and any documents the person showed when registering, or at the DMV for people who registered to vote when they got a driver’s license.
For anyone whose citizenship couldn’t be confirmed, Missakian asked the county to “segregate—not cancel” their mail ballots, and to hold any ballot already returned.
“If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime,” Missakian wrote. “Administrative difficulty is not a defense to violating federal law or aiding or abetting a federal offense.”
California’s reliance on voters’ sworn statements of citizenship, he wrote, “does not relieve election officials of their obligations under federal law when they are on actual notice of noncitizen voting.” He urged the county to cooperate “before taking actions that risk significant federal scrutiny and legal exposure.”
What the registrar wrote back
Bartolomie wrote that her office takes the allegations seriously and is reviewing them.
On the records, she wrote that the law doesn’t let her send them. The registration information Missakian asked for is confidential under the state Elections Code, and the county would need “supportable legal authority” to produce it. She cited a January ruling by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who threw out a Justice Department suit for California’s unredacted statewide voter file.
At this time, she wrote, she is “legally prohibited from providing the nonpublic information requested in the letter.”
On the ballots, she wrote that calling someone a “likely alien” is “insufficient to establish that any of the individuals identified is not a citizen and is ineligible to vote.” Under California law a voter proves citizenship by signing the registration affidavit under penalty of perjury, and any “doubt in the interpretation of the law shall be resolved in favor of the challenged voter,” she wrote, quoting the Elections Code. “Therefore, we have not been given ‘actual notice’ of any noncitizens voting in Mendocino County.”
Federal law also makes it illegal for her office to refuse to let a qualified voter vote, she wrote. If the department sends “additional individualized information” about the voters, or further legal authority, “I will review that information and reconsider your request.”
Asked Oct. 28 whether worried voters had been calling her office about the list, Bartolomie said no.
At least 40 counties got letters
Mendocino’s letter was one of many. By Oct. 24, county elections officials had forwarded the Secretary of State letters from U.S. attorney’s offices in California dated Oct. 22 or Oct. 23, and the state had been told that at least 40 counties had received one, “a majority of California’s 58 counties,” an attorney in the Secretary of State’s office said in a declaration filed in federal court that day.
The state’s own filing that day pointed to the first list sent here: “The list delivered to Mendocino County, for example, included only individuals from outside the county.”
Judge: holding ballots ‘would wreak havoc’
Mendocino County isn’t a party to the Justice Department’s suit against the state and Los Angeles County, which asks a federal court to keep the ballots of the more than 20,000 people on the statewide list out of the count until their citizenship is checked. On Oct. 28, the day Bartolomie sent her letter, U.S. District Judge Carter denied the Northern District’s request for an emergency order.
“Individuals who have met the requirements of California’s voter registration laws must not be deprived of a core right merely because of unfounded allegations stemming from a procedure rife with uncertainty and errors,” Carter wrote. Setting ballots aside “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway.”
The department already has a remedy, he wrote: prosecute people it can prove voted illegally, as it has been doing. He pointed to Nevada, where a Homeland Security list of 15,903 suspected noncitizen voters shrank to 185 after a manual review, and state officials then confirmed all 185 were citizens.
A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel declined to overturn him Friday, 2-1. On Monday the department asked the Supreme Court for an emergency order. The court denied it that evening, in one unsigned line.
The department has charged 28 people from the statewide list with voting or registration crimes. Five live in the Northern District, in Petaluma, San Jose, Daly City, Hayward and San Francisco. None was listed as living in Mendocino County.
Polls open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday
As of the morning of Oct. 28, the county had 13,843 ballots back from just under 54,000 registered voters, Bartolomie said. Polls are open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday, and drop boxes close at 8 p.m. The elections office number is 707-234-6819.