A federal judge in California on Wednesday turned down the Trump administration’s emergency request to make the state set aside roughly 20,000 mail-in ballots from people the Justice Department says are “likely” noncitizens, less than a week before Election Day.
U.S. District Judge David Carter issued a 26-page ruling Wednesday evening denying the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order, one day after a high-profile hearing in Los Angeles.
“Never before in American history”
Carter did not mince words. “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,” he wrote.
He said the request “violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections,” and warned that granting it “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens.”
“If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” Carter wrote at the end of his order. “This Court declines to be a party to such process.”
The judge questioned the government’s list
The Justice Department filed the lawsuit on Oct. 15, asking the court to order California to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from people the federal government identified as likely noncitizens and not count them until their citizenship was confirmed. The department said it had compiled a list of more than 20,000 names.
Carter said he could not find the government’s process credible, citing “the vagueness of Plaintiff’s descriptions of its procedures and the unreliability of its similar claims in other states.” He pointed to Nevada, where, he wrote, the Department of Homeland Security first flagged up to 15,903 registered voters as noncitizens, cut that to 6,218 and then to 185 after manual review, and Nevada officials later confirmed all 185 were citizens.
California officials have argued the list is unreliable, and a preliminary Los Angeles County analysis of a sample of names found that many did not have active voter registrations, according to NPR. A senior U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official disputed claims that people on the list were U.S.-born, while acknowledging four “might have a claim to U.S. citizenship.”
What happens next
Carter said the federal government still has a “clear remedy”: prosecuting individuals when it has evidence they voted illegally. Justice Department officials say they have charged dozens of people in the last two months for registering or voting without U.S. citizenship. Noncitizen voting has been shown by audits and investigations to be extremely rare.
The Justice Department is expected to appeal, and the fight could move to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and potentially the Supreme Court. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3.