Federal authorities have arrested multiple noncitizens this year for registering and voting in California, part of a Trump administration effort called Operation Protect the Vote, according to an account published by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group that tracks voter-roll issues.
The group’s president, J. Christian Adams, who also serves as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, says the foundation has documented cases tying sanctuary city policies in California to noncitizens appearing on voter rolls.
One case cited involves Elizaveta Shuvalova, a Russian citizen who had registered to vote in San Francisco. According to the account, she remained on the rolls until she returned an absentee ballot on which she wrote, “I am a Russian citizen!”
In Oakland, the foundation says some noncitizens disclosed on their voter registration forms that they were not U.S. citizens but were registered to vote anyway.
A disputed list of 20,000 names
Federal officials have given California data they say identifies roughly 20,000 people who may be noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. That data is tied to a lawsuit demanding California quarantine ballots from suspected noncitizens and verify their eligibility before counting the votes.
Adams, in his account, cautions that such lists are frequently imperfect. He points to his own prior experience in Virginia, where a list of more than 6,000 voters labeled as
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