The Department of Justice is suing Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page, alleging that he withheld unredacted records about non-citizens removed from the voter rolls. The lawsuit states that this violates federal election laws and harms voter confidence. Page says his office shared the records but redacted private information to comply with state law. The Department of Justice argues that those redactions obstruct proper oversight under federal law.
Page has not commented on the lawsuit, but earlier I spoke exclusively about this with Harmeet Dhillon, the Deputy Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice.
—All right, Harmeet Dhillon, welcome. Good to see you. —Yes, thank you for having me. —Could you summarize the basic argument you are presenting in this lawsuit?
The lawsuit concerns Orange County’s refusal to comply with a request that the U.S. Department of Justice made under the Help America Vote Act. HAVA is a law that requires jurisdictions in the United States to maintain clean voter rolls for federal elections.
And of course, Orange County conducts many federal elections and is obligated to provide us with certain information. They refused to give us personally identifiable information that we requested under this law. The request came from reports that there were individuals on Orange County’s voter rolls who were not U.S. citizens. And they were able to vote in federal elections, which is problematic.
So we are conducting our own investigation into this matter, as we are doing in other jurisdictions as well.
