California is fighting a federal voter roll audit all the way to the Ninth Circuit, as First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli says the state lets first-time voters prove their identity at the polls with gym cards and prescription labels and refuses to let Washington verify who is on the rolls.
The Department of Justice's effort to inspect California's voter registration database is now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, after a federal district court dismissed the suit on January 15, 2026. The DOJ appealed in February, and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli of the Central District of California went public on June 7, posting to X that California was "blocking a federal audit of its voter rolls" and announcing simultaneously that multiple active election fraud investigations were underway in the state.
Essayli said the DOJ has spent more than a year trying to gain access to California's voter files and has been refused at every turn. Federal law, he argued, gives the Attorney General explicit authority to review state voter registration records under the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the Civil Rights Act, specifically to confirm that only eligible U.S. citizens are registered for federal elections, according to KTLA. California has countered with state privacy law, and so far the courts have agreed with California at the trial level.
The original demand came from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon in August 2025: a complete electronic copy of the statewide voter registration file, including registered voters' full names, home addresses, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers, plus copies of every registration application submitted between December 2023 and July 2025. The district court, in granting California's motion to dismiss, found that the DOJ failed to satisfy the Civil Rights Act of 1960's requirements and that neither the NVRA nor HAVA preempted the state's privacy protections, according to the ACLU of Southern California, which intervened alongside the League of Women Voters of California on the state's behalf.
Running parallel to the litigation is what Essayli called a structural vulnerability in how California verifies new registrants. Under state policy documented by the California Secretary of State's office, a first-time voter who registers by mail or online and does not supply a driver's license number or Social Security number can prove identity at the polls using a gym membership card, an employer ID, a credit or debit card, a prescription drug label, or an insurance card. None of those documents confirm citizenship.
The provision is a fallback, applying to voters who lack or do not provide standard federal identifiers at the time of registration. But Essayli argued that California's refusal to open its rolls for federal inspection makes it impossible to know how many registrants took that pathway or whether any were ineligible to participate in federal elections. "California allows first-time voters to register using forms of ID that most Americans would find surprising," Essayli wrote in his June 7 post, as reported by KTLA and Just the News. Snopes, which examined the same policy on June 10, confirmed that the nontraditional IDs are a valid option under California's rules.
Beyond the ID question, Essayli raised concerns about basic list maintenance: without federal access to the rolls, there is no independent way to verify whether California has been promptly removing deceased voters, people who have moved out of state, or individuals convicted of felonies that disqualify them from voting.
Fraud Probes Running Alongside
Essayli announced the election fraud investigations on June 5, three days after California's June 2 primary, as the state was still counting ballots. He said the probes were being conducted in coordination with the FBI's Los Angeles field office but declined to name the specific targets or describe the nature of the alleged fraud, according to KTLA and Fox 11 Los Angeles. California has not been charged with any wrongdoing, and no public findings have been released.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber has maintained that the state's systems already meet every federal requirement and that turning over a comprehensive voter database would expose millions of Californians to unnecessary privacy risks. Her office issued a statement after the January dismissal calling the win a defense of "voter privacy" against what it described as an unprecedented federal intrusion.
The Ninth Circuit has not yet scheduled oral argument on the DOJ's appeal, according to available reporting. A ruling for the federal government would compel California to hand over its voter data for inspection. A ruling sustaining the dismissal would likely end the audit effort unless the DOJ escalated to the Supreme Court, and it would signal to other states that they can refuse similar federal demands. The outcome matters well beyond California: it will define the outer boundary of federal oversight over state voter rolls heading into the 2026 midterm cycle.
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