NYT:

California election officials looking into Trump administration demands to verify the citizenship or block the votes of suspected noncitizens said on Friday that the government had sent them lists so sloppily compiled, and on such short notice, that it was difficult, if not impossible, to comply.

Officials said that they received thousands of names lacking critical identifying information like Social Security numbers, and that many of the names were paired with California addresses over which they had no jurisdiction.

“It was basically a data dump,” said Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for Los Angeles County’s registrar’s office.

The method by which the federal government transmitted the list — a thumb drive with a sticky note containing a password — also initially threatened the security of voter rolls, and made elections officials reluctant to use it, Mr. Sanchez said….

In Los Angeles County, voting officials said they had started to examine an Excel spreadsheet federal prosecutors transmitted later with what appeared to be the same list of more than 20,000 names that was said to be on thumb drive.

Mr. Sanchez said the list was from all over the state, not just Los Angeles County, “and there was no sortation by county, city, ZIP code or source verification.”

That spreadsheet, he said, is being examined by county officials to determine how many people on it, if any, are registered voters in Los Angeles. The Justice Department, he added, “made no attempt to engage, other than dropping off the letter” less than 48 hours before the response deadline, and then filing the lawsuit a day after sending the spreadsheet.

“The message we’re trying to put out is, we don’t want this to be a distraction or deter people from voting,” Mr. Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder, said in an interview.

The government’s demands, he added, seem to be “largely performative, and a lot of legal questions remain up in the air that we believe will be best addressed through the litigation. Our focus is in conducting a fair, accurate and transparent election over the next 18 days.”