Judge Rejects Justice Department Bid to Set Aside 20,000 California Ballots
Seven Lights
A federal judge denied the Justice Department Wednesday evening a temporary restraining order that would have forced Los Angeles County to stop processing roughly 20,000 ballots federal officials associate with suspected non-citizens, less than a week before the midterm elections.
U.S. District Judge David Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, rejected the emergency request in a 26-page ruling. The department had asked the court to quarantine the ballots and bar their counting. Judge Carter wrote that the relief sought would hand the courts to “the will of the Executive Branch,” and concluded: “This Court declines to be a party to such process.”
The suit rested on a Department of Homeland Security analysis claiming as many as 190,000 non-citizens sit on California’s voter rolls, from which election officials and the department’s list flagged some 20,000 registrations. Los Angeles County’s preliminary analysis found the federal list unreliable, and the county and state argued that halting the counting, already underway, would be unlawful and unworkable and would disenfranchise eligible voters.
Judge Carter shared that concern. He observed that the federal government could address the problem “by continuing to indict people for the crime of illegally voting as noncitizens,” and pointed out that Justice Department officials say they have charged dozens of people with that crime in the past two months. At the close of his order he returned to the precedent the request would set.
The Justice Department said immediately after the ruling that it will appeal. The suit is the department’s most aggressive step yet in a contest over non-citizen voting that has escalated as election tensions rise.
The ruling clears the way for Los Angeles County, the country’s largest, to count the challenged ballots alongside the rest. Any appellate action would come after Californians vote, leaving the contests decided on ballots whose legality may be argued in court after the fact.