A federal judge ruled that the Justice Department cannot force California to set aside mail ballots from 20,000 alleged noncitizens. Federal prosecutors immediately appealed.
A federal judge in Los Angeles rejected a Trump administration request late Wednesday to force California election officials to separate mail-in ballots from roughly 20,000 voters it claims are noncitizens.
U.S. District Judge David Carter ruled that the Justice Department’s demand for a temporary restraining order would intrude on state authority days before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, CBS News reported. Carter wrote that the federal government’s request to exclude the ballots violates constitutional rules that give states control over voting procedures. Granting such last-minute relief, he warned, would let political parties create chaos and potentially strip registered citizens of their voting rights.
The decision follows a federal lawsuit filed after federal prosecutors gave local election officials 48 hours to verify citizenship records or sequester mail ballots. Carter wrote in his 26-page opinion that the government’s proposed relief would disrupt voting, intimidate election workers and voters, and discount legitimate votes.
Carter pointed out during court proceedings that the Justice Department already has the power to investigate and prosecute anyone who casts an illegal ballot, according to NBC News. Noting that prosecutors recently indicted 28 people for illegal voting in the state, the judge questioned why the federal government did not rely on criminal charges after the election rather than risk taking away the rights of lawful voters.
Doubts over federal voter data
California and Los Angeles County officials attacked the credibility of the federal list throughout the case. California mails ballots to all 23 million registered voters, and more than 3.7 million people have already voted statewide, Fox News reported. In Los Angeles County alone, workers have processed more than 500,000 ballots by removing them from their return envelopes, making it impossible to trace which ballot belongs to a specific voter.
Lawyers representing California argued in court that the Justice Department used suspect, vague information and failed to explain how it built its database. State attorney Anne Bellows told the court that demanding an immediate investigation into tens of thousands of voters without clear standards just before an election served as a “recipe for disenfranchisement.”
Los Angeles County examined a sample of 200 names from the federal list. County officials reported that more than half of the sample involved voter registrations that were already canceled or inactive, meaning no ballot was ever mailed to them. Among the sampled voters who listed a birthplace, more than 38% indicated they were born in the United States. An official with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Nicolas Bartell, filed a declaration stating agency checks showed none of those 200 individuals were born in the country, while acknowledging the agency found about 189 records with minor data errors on its list.
Noncitizen voting is illegal under both federal and state law. Outside California, the administration’s scrutiny has spread nationwide, with federal officials issuing more than 100 subpoenas across at least 13 states to examine local voter records, Al Jazeera reported. The Justice Department also sent a letter to Washington state officials demanding they withhold ballots from 400 voters on its rolls.
Appeals and what happens next
The Justice Department argued that California’s refusal to sequester the flagged ballots risks diluting lawful votes by commingling them with illegal ones. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli stated that the administration was enforcing election integrity standards rather than changing voting rules in the middle of an election, insisting the government was not seeking to cancel ballots outright.
Federal prosecutors had already tried to bypass Carter by seeking emergency intervention at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier in the week. A three-judge panel dismissed that request on Monday in a 2-1 decision, ruling that the administration had created its own emergency by waiting months to sue after first raising concerns in July.
Immediately after Carter issued his Wednesday night ruling, the Justice Department filed a notice of appeal with the 9th Circuit. Essayli announced that the solicitor general authorized an expedited appeal, and federal prosecutors plan to seek another emergency order from the appellate court to block California from counting the disputed ballots before Election Day.
