The United States Supreme Court swiftly shut down an emergency request from the administration of President Donald Trump on Monday, rejecting an effort to force California to segregate and halt the counting of more than 20,000 mail-in ballots from voters the Justice Department claims are not U.S. citizens.
The rapid decision came just one day before the U.S. midterm elections, underscoring a failed attempt by the administration to intervene in the nation’s most populous state. The justices did not ask to see a response brief from California before ruling, which is not their usual practice in high-profile cases.
A Rapid Rejection on the Eve of Midterms
Voting in California has been underway since early October, with ballots mailed to around 23 million registered voters and hundreds of thousands already processed. State officials maintained that separating the disputed ballots would be nearly impossible once mixed with others. The emergency filing on Monday followed a string of losses for the administration in lower courts.
BREAKING: The Trump administration appeals to the Supreme Court in a push to sideline 20,000 California mail ballots. https://t.co/kEDIoqb6YS
On Friday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the administration from interfering in California’s mail-in ballot counting. In a 2-1 decision, U.S. Circuit Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez wrote that the federal government has no power to dictate to states how to run elections. “If the United States believes different procedures are necessary for vote-by-mail ballots, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not the courts,” the appeals panel stated.
Disputed Lists and County Pushback
The legal standoff began in mid-October when the Justice Department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento. The drive contained a list of more than 20,000 names, giving local officials 48 hours to review the data and threatening to sue if the ballots were not sequestered until those listed could verify their citizenship.
Local election officials immediately questioned the reliability of the data. Dean Logan, Los Angeles County clerk and recorder, stated that federal authorities failed to provide underlying evidence or methodology supporting their assertions. Other counties reported similar discrepancies. Butte County Clerk-Recorder Keaton Denlay noted that upon inspecting a list of 47 names sent to his office, he found it looked like a print screen of a poorly formatted spreadsheet with missing information, and that 32 of the individuals were not even on active voter rolls.
U.S. District Judge David Carter previously rebuffed the administration’s request on October 28, writing that such federal interference was unusual and extreme. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” Carter wrote.
Broader Legal Fallout and Contempt Threats
Beyond the Supreme Court appeal, the Justice Department pursued aggressive tactics across the state, opening criminal investigations, subpoenaing local election offices, and threatening officials with felony charges for knowingly processing ineligible ballots. Uzoma Nkwonta of the Elias Law Group noted that the courts repeatedly rejected attempts to cast a cloud of suspicion over eligible voters.
The battle also drew in legal disputes over data analysis. The Justice Department filed a motion Sunday suggesting that a federal judge consider contempt charges against an immigrant rights group and its lawyers after they published an analysis of the government’s voter list. Alberto Lammers, a spokesman for the UCLA Voting Rights Project, countered that counsel and their experts fully complied with court orders.
While the administration argued that ineligible voting by noncitizens undermines federal law, independent studies and state audits have shown that noncitizen voting is rare.
